Financial Industry Regulatory Authority

The profile

FINRA describes itself as a self-regulatory organisation for member broker-dealers, registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission and operating under its oversight, and is careful to say that it is a private not-for-profit membership organisation rather than part of the government. Its own account dates the work to the 1930s. It writes and enforces the rules that govern member firms, examines them for compliance, monitors market activity for misconduct, administers the qualification examinations that licence individual representatives, runs the industry's dispute resolution forum and operates trade reporting facilities. For a firm entering the US securities business the practical consequence is that registration with the SEC is not the end of the process: membership of a self-regulatory organisation is required as well, and it is the approval date in FINRA's records that fixes when a broker-dealer became one. BrokerCheck, its public register, is where that date and the firm's SEC number can be read.