FINRA’s New Small Firm Broker-Dealer Helpline

If you’re like most broker-dealer executives, you wear many hats. Sometimes owners are driving direction as CEO, and other times they put their compliance hat on to put out fires. One commonality amongst all broker-dealer owners – we lack time. There is far too much to do during the day. Quickly formulated approaches and fast information is a necessity when running a firm. Unfortunately, we’ve all run into those moments when our FINRA coordinator is either unavailable, lacks the information that we require or tell us the old adage, “that’s a business decision”.

Because a FINRA coordinator is the primary and sometimes the only source of contact that most firms have with the regulator, their unavailability or inability to resolve specific queries can cost firms both time and money. Based on recent communication from FINRA, it seems our regulator has taken steps to resolve this issue permanently. As part of its FINRA360 initiative, the agency has created a new tool specifically designed for small broker-dealers that lack a full legal department, yet need regulatory answers quickly.

FINRA Small Firm Helpline

The tool, ‘FINRA Small Firm Helpline’, has been created to provide firms with another route through which they can get answers to their regulatory questions. Although your FINRA coordinator will still remain your primary source of contact for answering regulatory questions, especially those that are specific to your firm, the new helpline can help you in getting quick answers to general and/or navigational queries. Moreover, if the representative handling your call can’t provide an answer to your questions, he/she will be able to connect you with the appropriate department or person who can.
The helpline 833-26-FINRA / 833-263-4672 is operational from Monday to Friday between 9:00 A.M. and 5:00 P.M. (EST).

For Further Compliance Assistance Give Us A Call!

If the helpline is not enough or you are facing any compliance related issues you can always call us at Compliance Exchange Group (CXG). We provide principal outsourcing and full-service compliance solutions for broker-dealers.