Securities Fee Working Group Collaborates on Standardized Broker-Dealer Fees

A working group convened by the National American Securities Administrators Association ("NASAA") developed a model fee disclosure schedule to help investors better understand and compare various broker-dealer services, maintenance-related fees and guidelines to make fee disclosure accessible and transparent. The NASAA "Fee Working Group" consisted of state securities regulators and representatives of FINRA, SIFMA, the Financial Services Institute ("FSI"), and a number of sell-side financial institutions.

The Fee Working Group recommended the following investor access guidelines to enhance broker-dealer fee disclosure and transparency:

• a broker-dealer's fee schedule should be made available on the firm's public web site;
• if the broker-dealer's web site has an internal search bar, a search for the term "fee" or "fees" should return a link to the fee schedule as one of the top responses;
• the fee schedule should be accessible through a simple Internet search when using any of the common search engines and readily printable in chart form from the broker-dealer's web site (e.g., in a stand-alone .pdf format); and
• a paper version of the fee schedule should be made available to potential retail customers upon request and to retail customers at the time of account opening.