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SEC Chair Adds CFA Director of Investor Protection to Senior Staff

The Securities and Exchange Commission has appointed Barbara Roper as senior advisor to chairman Gary Gensler.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has appointed Barbara Roper as senior advisor to chairman Gary Gensler. Roper currently serves as the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), an association of more than 250 non-profit consumer organizations that was established in 1968.

Roper has worked at the CFA for 35 years and has been a consumer spokesperson on investor protection issues, particularly the standards that apply to investment professionals that investors rely on for advice and recommendations.

As senior advisor to Gensler, she will focus on issues relating to retail investor protection, including matters relating to policy, broker-dealer oversight, investment adviser oversight, and examinations.

“Barb is a champion for investors and will provide invaluable counsel on behalf of the American public,” said Gensler. “I’ve had the pleasure of working closely with her on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the critical market reforms of the Dodd-Frank Act, and I’m thrilled to collaborate with her again at the SEC.”

Roper was an outspoken proponent of the original Department of Labor fiduciary rule and an equally vocal critic of the version ultimately adopted during the Trump administration.

“While the rule may be better than nothing in the short term, this flawed rule must not be the stopping point for the Department’s efforts to better protect retirement savers from conflicted advice,” Roper said via Twitter back in February when the DOL released its timeline for the rule’s effectiveness.

“It is worth noting that many of the weaknesses in the DOL rule are rooted in its reliance on the SEC’s vague and undefined Regulation Best Interest,” she added. “But Reg BI’s chief weakness – that key terms like ‘best interest’ and mitigation of conflicts are undefined – could now be its chief strength, if new leaders at the agency interpret and enforce these requirements to the benefit of investors, as we expect they will.”

In her 15-page introduction letter to Gensler back in April, Roper said that the CFA has greeted each new SEC chair since 1999 with a plea to reform the regulation of broker-dealers and investment advisers – this time focusing on Regulation Best Interest and its related rules, and how to use those regulations as a framework “to build a more robust regulatory approach.”

“For decades, the Commission has failed to live up to its central investor protection mission when it comes to the regulation of broker-dealers and investment advisers,” said Roper in the letter. “You have an opportunity to correct that failure, and we urge you to do so. It is, in CFA’s view, the most important step you can and should take to protect the interests of millions of financially unsophisticated individuals who turn to the markets to save for retirement or other important life goals and desperately need advice they can trust to navigate those decisions.”

According to the SEC, Roper has conducted studies of the financial planning industry, state oversight of investment advisers, and state and federal financial planning regulation, among others. “She has also conducted studies on the need for audit reform in the wake of the Enron scandal, the need for mutual fund reform in the wake of trading and sales abuse scandals, the information preferences of mutual fund shareholders, the potential of the Internet to improve disclosure, and securities law weaknesses as a cause of the financial crisis,” the agency said.

Roper has served on numerous advisory committees at the SEC, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and other entities, and is a graduate of Princeton University.

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