The Securities and Exchange Commission is accelerating work on its own version of the “fiduciary rule,” a regulation issued by the Labor Department that put restraints on brokers handling retirement accounts, the Wall Street Journal reported. The SEC’s effort would affect all brokerage accounts — not just those for retirement funds — and could ban brokers from calling themselves financial advisers unless they accept a strict duty of loyalty to clients. The SEC hopes to vote to propose its rules by the second quarter of 2018, according to people familiar with the matter. That would be a first step toward creating consistent federal standards for all brokerage accounts, since the Labor Department’s rules only covered 401(k)s and individual retirement accounts, or IRAs.
