June 28, 2008

Can't Write It? Jott It.

OK, I am a sucker for new technology. I love playing with stuff. I was looking at my Gmail account and an Adword caught my eye for a product called Jott. It promised emails from voice.

So I clicked the link, read the site and signed up. It's free, so you can't beat the price. The setup was a piece of cake. I sent an email to myself as a test. The voice recognition was perfect and the whole process couldn't be simpler.

The system recognizes my cell phone number and allows me to send emails to contacts that I set up. It can read my contact names very well and I am stunned at the quality of the transcription. As a road warrior, being able to send emails without typing will be a real boon. I wonder if Jott intends to allow emails to be transcribed to voice and have them read back if I called in?

That's the voice-recognized view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

Posted by Admin |

Posted In: Items of Interest

June 19, 2008

SEC Victorious in Next Financial Customer Information Case

The securities industry, no doubt, has been waiting for the decision in this case for a while. The Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") filed an action against NEXT Financial, Inc., an independent broker-dealer firm. The SEC was rightfully unhappy about NEXT's broker transition practices. I've commented on this before, but when you don't work for a brokerage firm and you're accessing that firm's records to enable that firm's broker to transition to your firm, you're doing something wrong. Apparently a few people skipped that class.

An old adage is that "bad cases make bad law." This was a bad case. NEXT had people who would access competitors' computer systems. NEXT had people accessing mutual fund systems using the recruits' user information. And NEXT did nothing to safeguard the information of non-customers on its computer system. The SEC was shooting fish in a barrel.

The Administrative Judge found that NEXT did what the SEC alleged. You can view a copy of the opinion here. It's ugly. Even the proposed changes to Regulation S-P, relating to customer information protection, couldn't help. And now the securities industry is going to have to live with this decision brought about by the overreaching of one of its members.

The lesson here, folks, is don't access other firm's computer systems. Don't take more than you need. And take steps to protect the information you do bring to your new firm.

That's the view from The Law Planet, Jupiter, Florida.

Posted by Admin |

Posted In: Legal Issues , Securities Industry

June 2, 2008

FINRA Cracks Down On Phony Authorship

We've all seen them - the books and magazines that look like they feature a financial salesperson. In fact, NBC's Dateline program did an expose on annity sales practices. Several of the agents the show targeted had phony ghostwritten articles.

In FINRA Notice to Members 08-27, the regulators stated that using ghostwritten materials could violate a number of rules, including NASD Rules 2110, 2120 and 2210 and Incorporated NYSE Rule 472. Frankly, the use of the word "could" is fairly silly. How about "does" unless, in a conspicuous place, the financial representative discloses that the only connection he had to the article was possession of a credit card and a digital picture?

This is one of those common sense kind of moments. Others call it the "Wall Street Journal" test. Do you want your behavior displayed on the front page of the "Wall Street Journal"? Generally, no.

FINRA's Notice to Members addresses a recent theme, aggressive sales tactics used in connection with seniors. FINRA has issued pronouncements regarding "free" lunch seminars, the use of certifications that are nothing more than mail order multiple question tests and, now, the use of phony news articles. All of these are good steps to protect those who can least afford to make financial mistakes.

That's the view from The Law Planet - Jupiter, Florida.

Posted by Admin |

Posted In: Securities Industry

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