March 3rd, 2010 Bill Winterberg
In a press release yesterday, LiveOffice, an email archiving and compliance provider to financial advisors, announced the release of its LiveOffice Social Archive service.
According to the LiveOffice press release, Social Archive is:
the first social media archiving solution to capture and retain content from any public website, including popular social networks, such as LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as blogs.
Now I debate the statement that Social Archive is the first archiving solution (I’ve tweeted and blogged before about Arkovi Backups, Smarsh, SocialWare, and several others). Nevertheless, LiveOffice joins a short list of providers aimed at providing compliance solutions to registered representatives and independent RIAs who want to use social media websites.
Read the entire press release by clicking here.
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February 19th, 2010 Bill Winterberg
If you’re a Smarsh user, you undoubtedly noticed that email services aren’t working today. To add insult to injury, when their customer service number is called, the number isn’t working.
I first found out from Google Alerts I set up to monitor Smarsh, an email hosting and archive provider for the financial services industry. I saw this post on Compliance Insights, and then turned to Twitter for more information.
According to @roguebob and @safetyinnumbers, Smarsh is experiencing a severe network outage that has disrupted its website service as well as its VOIP phone system.
But the company contacted @safetyinnumbers and assured him that “emails are queueing and not being lost.”
Twitter appears to be the best source for updates at the moment, though the lack of network service obviously makes it difficult for the company to update its own Twitter account, @SmarshInc.
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February 3rd, 2010 Bill Winterberg
Earlier today, FINRA held a webinar titled Compliance Considerations for Social Networking Sites. I had a schedule conflict, otherwise I definitely would have attended.
Thankfully, Chad Bockius of Socialware posted a summary of the webinar content plus the Twitter stream he generated during the event.
Click here to read Chad’s summary.
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December 17th, 2009 Bill Winterberg
About six months ago in response to the uproar over the Bernie Madoff fraud, the SEC proposed updates to the custody rule that would require RIAs who debit fees from client accounts to be subject to surprise audits.
Needless to say, this proposal did not go over well, especially when costs for surprise audits were estimated to be north of $8,000.
See previous posts on FPPad: Proposed SEC Custody Rules Could Cost Advisers Extra $8,100 and SEC Surprise Audit Proposal Likely to be Dropped According to FPA.
Yesterday the SEC passed new custody regulations, and the surprise audit provision for RIAs who only debit fees was dropped. In addition, the SEC published a custody matrix, if you will, defining the different adviser arrangements along with their respective duties and responsibilities.
The folks over at RIABiz posted more about the custody provisions, plus they included the custody matrix chart for reference.
Click here to view the custody matrix on the RIABiz website.
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December 16th, 2009 Bill Winterberg
Back in October 2008 I wrote about a passage in the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act signed into law that requires cost basis reporting by securities brokers (see the original FPPad post).
Today I learned from this AICPA Journal of Accountancy tweet that the IRS has posted proposed regulations titled “Basis Reporting by Securities Brokers and Basis Determination for Stock” available for viewing on the Federal Register website.
Click here to view the PDF in all its 141 pages of glory.
I don’t quite have the time to browse the proposal right now, but thankfully the folks over at the AICPA JofA just posted a good summary of the proposal.
Click here to read the AICPA’s JofA Regulations Proposed on Basis Reporting by Brokers.
Update 12/21/2009: Also read this article Brokerages face 2011 start date for reporting cost-basis info from InvestmentNews.
However, there’s no real insight as to what exactly the proposal means for independent financial advisers. Hint: It probably doesn’t change much of anything, as custodians are likely to bear the brunt of the regulatory changes. If anything, that means custodial fees likely will go up.
The comment period for this proposal is open until February 8, 2010 and a public hearing is scheduled for February 17, 2010. That will be a barn-burner of a hearing!
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November 23rd, 2009 Bill Winterberg
I posted back in October that FINRA scheduled a webinar to discuss guidelines when using social networking websites. The webinar was scheduled for December 16, 2009.
I learned today via AdvisorTweets on Twitter that the webinar has been postponed for three months. It now is scheduled for March 17, 2010. One thing that hasn’t changed is the $50 member/$100 non-member registration fee required to attend the event.
Click the image below to connect to FINRA’s website and get the new details.
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October 21st, 2009 Bill Winterberg
Like them or not, FINRA is getting the jump on the SEC over issuing guidelines to registered representatives regarding the use of social networking.
FINRA is offering a compliance webinar on December 16, 2009 to cover “compliance and regulatory considerations when using social networking sites to communicate firm business.”
Why FINRA decided to charge $50 for members and $100 for non-members is beyond me. I would think they would want to make this information free to increase compliance with the guidelines set by FINRA. I digress.
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