In the wake of soured private placement deals in Medical Capital Holdings and Provident Royalties – as well as other investments gone bad at the hands of rogue brokers – the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) is putting more information about its disciplinary actions online for investors and others to view.
Launched May 17, the new Disciplinary Actions Online database provides access to FINRA complaints filed against firms and individual brokers, settlement agreements and decisions by FINRA arbitration panels. In the past, anyone wanting information about those items had to contact FINRA directly.
The new and improved database will provide enhanced functionality, allowing users to conduct searches by broker or firm name, timeframe, key words and case numbers.
The database also includes pending complaints that FINRA has filed against firms and brokers. As reported May 18 by Investment News, this feature alone could make pending complaints easier to find, compared to the multistep process needed to locate pending actions disclosed on FINRA’s BrokerCheck system.
Beginning June 15, FINRA’s monthly disciplinary action summaries will contain links to corresponding documents in the new disciplinary database.