SEC's White: Fiduciary rule remains 'major focus'

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Jo White said Wednesday that developing a fiduciary duty rule for brokers remains a “major focus of our efforts.”

After her remarks at the Securities Enforcement Forum in Washington, White told reporters that while she couldn’t predict “time-wise when we reach it [a rule proposal], it’s very important to work on and resolve where we are going on it.”

Related story: Is it too late for a fiduciary standard?

In hopes of pushing the SEC’s fiduciary rulemaking along, a subcommittee of the agency’s Investor Advisory Committee has drafted a proposal that would put brokers under fiduciary standards that advisors adhere to.

Under the draft proposal, the subcommittee says that a fiduciary duty for investment advice should include, “first and foremost, an enforceable, principles-based obligation to act in the best interest of the customer.”

In approaching this issue, the subcommittee says that the SEC’s goal “should be to eliminate the regulatory gap that allows broker-dealers to offer investment advice without being subject to the same fiduciary duty as other investment advisors but not to eliminate the ability of broker-dealers to offer transaction-specific advice compensated through transaction-based payments.”

Barbara Roper, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America, who chairs the SEC’s Investor as Purchaser Subcommittee that issued the proposal, told ThinkAdvisor that the subcommittee’s hope was that “by weighing in early in the [fiduciary rulemaking] process, we can help to shape the form that commission rulemaking takes.”