Regulation

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged three New York-based investment firms and four former senior officers with fraud, misuse of client assets and other securities laws violations, when they masked financial troubles within their $66 million advisory business.

Commission says FINRA is Congress’ best bet for policing advisors.

WASHINGTON — 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.

The Securities and Exchange Commission 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.”

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.

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.”