Knowledge and Insight > Thought Leadership

7 Dirty Words for RIAs to Avoid

Bob Veres | Financial Planning, March 2014

Summary:Every month, I try to determine the most important issue to write about, yet most of the time I end up delving into the seemingly boring topic of regulation. Why? Because I think the massive lobbying effort by the brokerage world and the Financial Services Institute to make FINRA the chief regulator of the financial planning and RIA community poses an existential threat. I actually believe that FINRA regulation would snuff out the creativity and idealism of our profession - and put a lot of great advisory firms out of business, reducing a lot of pesky competition for FINRA's brokerage firm members.

Once you deconstruct the clever terminology, you begin to see some of the ideas the sales industry desperately wants to hide - and make its agenda obvious to the people whose financial well-being the sales model most endangers.”