Adviser Compliance for 2013, Part II: Annual Privacy Notices

Adviser compliance NYCIn this heightened enforcement environment, it is increasingly important for advisers to meet all of their annual compliance obligations.

Under Regulation S-P, advisers, brokers, and investment companies must provide a privacy notice to all customers at least once a year. The annual privacy notice must detail the firm’s privacy policies and practices, particularly how it collects, stores, and shares customers’ “nonpublic personal information.”

To ensure compliance, below are several quick tips:

  • Firms are permitted to determine when the annual notice will be sent to customers; however, the date should remain consistent.
  • Firms are allowed to combine a privacy notice with another document.  The notice, however, must be clear and conspicuous.
  • Firms can deliver a single annual privacy notice to multiple customers who share an address if the notice is sent with a shareholder report or a prospectus delivered under the SEC’s householding rules.
  • Firms may deliver one privacy notice to a customer with multiple accounts so long as the privacy notice makes clear each of the accounts to which it applies.
  • Firms must provide privacy notices in a fashion so that each consumer can reasonably be expected to actually receive it. A posting on the web site is ok, if the customer actually uses the web site to access financial products and services and has agreed to receive notices on it.
  • To make it real easy, federal regulators, including the SEC, provide an Online Form Builder. Of course you can also use your own.

Eckerle Law offers a highest-quality and cost-effective alternative to the traditional law firm model for a wide variety of transactional and regulatory matters serving all your business law needs. Our experienced attorneys also provide a full range of compliance services for investment advisers, offering compliance tools that are tailored to fit the ever changing regulatory landscape as well as your business needs.

If your company would like to strengthen its business practices, please contact us today so we can leverage our experience to create real-life business and legal solutions to help your business thrive.