Practice

On Wednesday The Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund and the Association of Small Foundations announced a new white paper titled “The Best of Both Worlds: Using Private Foundations and Donor-Advised Funds” to inform donors and advisors about how these two giving vehicles complement each other.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has censured and fined Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. $500,000 for failing to establish and maintain written supervisory procedures to ensure that its representatives considered customers’ state income-tax benefits in their suitability analyses of 529 college saving plans.

Most regulations already cover financial planning activities, but designations need another look.

Estate tax reform in 2010 was marked by significant disagreement from both the House and Senate on whether any changes should be temporary or permanent.

Eileen Rominger joins the securities regulator after spending the past 11 years working as the global CIO for Goldman Sachs Asset Management (

The Securities and Exchange Commission has selected Eileen Rominger as director of the division of investment management.

The raft of documents released Tuesday by the Financial Stability Oversight Council gave little sense of what the final regulations would look like for implementing the Volcker Rule, identifying systematically important nonbanks or dealing with other issues involved in Wall Street reform.

The SEC has fined BNY Mellon $24 million and has banned a former manager of institutional trading at Mellon Securities from associating with any broker dealer firm after carrying out what it called an “eight-year best execution fraud.”

Roth IRA conversions surged last year, particularly in the fourth quarter as investors looked to take advantage of regulatory changes.Bank of America reported that it executed more than 56,000 conversions for its clients last year, nearly 45,000 more than the total number of conversions in 2009.

The first wave of affluent Baby Boomers, those between the ages of 55 and 64 with investable assets of at least $100,000, have 12% less saved than they did four years ago, a survey of 4,000 people by Cogent Research found.