On February 15, 2023, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a new rule for registered investment advisers that would replace the current “custody rule” under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 (Advisers Act) with a new “safeguarding rule”[1] and make corresponding amendments to the Adviser Act’s recordkeeping rule and Form ADV.
Additional
On November 9, 2020, the Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (“OCIE”) of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) published a risk alert discussing its observations from a series of examinations that focused on SEC-registered investment advisers operating from numerous branch offices and with operations geographically dispersed from the adviser’s principal or main office.
As COVID-19 continues to impact global markets, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) have recently provided certain guidance and targeted relief in recognition of the potential disruption that COVID-19 may have on market participants regulated by the Commission. The following Mayer Brown client alerts describe and take a closer look at certain COVID-19 related
Hello dear readers. If you are reading this today, on April 1, and you have a December 31 fiscal year end, then you have survived your annual Form ADV amendment. Congratulations! And while many of you are doubtless gearing up for an annual Form PF filing due at the end of this month, you might
It’s time for another periodic round-up of noteworthy SEC enforcement actions. Topics in this update: hypothetical and back-tested performance, cybersecurity/privacy, and private fund conflicts, and then a lightning round of other odds and ends.
Continue Reading SEC Enforcement Round-Up II: Electric Boogaloo
There’s clearly no summer lull at the SEC Division of Enforcement’s Asset Management Unit—over the past two weeks, we’ve seen a deluge of more cases impacting investment advisers than we’ve seen afternoon thunderstorms (and here in DC, that’s saying something). In this post I’m going to briefly summarize some of the take-aways for these cases impacting the pay-to-play rule, the “testimonial rule,” and the custody rule.
Continue Reading SEC Enforcement Round-Up
Fund managers that are affiliated with U.S. banks, or that have historically courted U.S. banks (or their affiliates) as investors in their funds, are by now very familiar with the restrictions imposed by the “Volcker Rule” since its adoption in December 2013. A massive regulatory undertaking, the rule was adopted by five of the U.S. financial regulators (namely, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the SEC, and the CFTC) acting in concert, and resulted in sweeping changes to how U.S. banks and their affiliates make proprietary investments and how they interact with so-called “covered funds.” From the perspective of a ’40 Act practitioner, it was clear at the time, and has remained so ever since, that the group of august regulators did not, collectively, grasp some of the implications of the way the final regulation approached some issues involving covered funds–including the very way that term was defined.
After several years of Congressional logjam and the regulators addressing some of the more vexing issues in the Volcker Rule through FAQs, we now suddenly find ourselves moving forward with changes to the Volcker Rule on multiple fronts. Unfortunately–at least from this practitioner’s perspective as an investment management lawyer–most of the changes we’ve seen so far are targeted at the proprietary trading side of the rule, rather than the covered fund side. That said, there are still a few things on the covered fund side worth mentioning, especially for industry participants interested in making their voice heard by the regulators.