A key SEC unit is devoting more resources to asset managers and other RIAs, and the regulatory agency is already seeing an impact.

Lorraine Echavarria WilmerHale Partner

Pete Driscoll, acting director of the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE), confirms that OCIE has shifted some staff away from examining broker-dealers towards examining registered investment advisors and consultants. OCIE now has about 600 examiners focused on advisors, up about 20 percent, Driscoll tells fundsters this morning at the ICI Mutual Funds and Investment Management conference at the JW Marriott Desert Springs in Palm Desert, CA.

Thanks to that staffing shift, Driscoll says, he's seeing "a good uptick exams in that space [RIAs] this year, up 26 percent from where we were last year at this time."

"We still have about 240 [examiners] devoted to the B-D space," Driscoll adds.

The OCIE shift towards RIAs may translate into more enforcement, too, says Stephanie Avakian, acting director of the SEC's division of enforcement. As more examiners switch to the investment advisor and investment consultant side and do more exams, Avakian says, expect the number of referrals to enforcement to increase.

"We refer around 10 percent of our exams to enforcement," Driscoll says. "I do think that will remain consistent. The referral rate's a little bit higher in the B-D space than it is in the IA space."

Avakian and Driscoll are speaking on the ICI MFIM 2017 main stage. The panel, "A Conversation with OCIE and Enforcement," also features Lorraine Echavarria, an SEC alumnus who is now a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale, and is moderated by Chris Michailoff, director at Deutsche Bank. 

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