Regulation

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.”

A coalition of financial planning experts urged lawmakers to keep the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in charge of investment advisor regulation for the sake of cost and efficiency, just days ahead of several federal reports on the industry due next week.

But will a new self-regulator be the new reality?

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. board is scheduled to move ahead on new resolution powers and discuss executive compensation structures at a meeting Tuesday.

A group of House Financial Services Democrats are raising questions about whether taxpayers will be fully protected under the terms of a recent settlement over poorly underwritten loans held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.