Approved IAR CE Courses

“Best Interest” in financial advising can mean various things, such as the most beneficial product, a duty of loyalty and care, or fair pricing. This course explores Regulation “Best Interest,” its meaning, origins, challenges, and its impact on broker-dealers and investment advisers in the financial industry.

This course provides a comprehensive, practical examination of Regulation Best Interest (Reg BI) — the SEC's foundational standard of conduct governing broker-dealers and their associated persons when making recommendations to retail customers. Since its compliance date in June 2020, Reg BI has remained a top FINRA examination priority, with persistent deficiencies identified across all four of its core obligations: Care, Disclosure, Conflict of Interest, and Compliance.

Developed in alignment with the SEC's Regulation Best Interest release, FINRA's 2026 Annual Regulatory Oversight Report (Reg BI and Form CRS section), SEC Staff Bulletins on Care Obligations and Conflicts of Interest, and related guidance, this course equips registered representatives, investment adviser representatives (IARs), and compliance professionals with the knowledge to understand what Reg BI requires, how FINRA and the SEC evaluate compliance, and how to apply the standard correctly in daily practice.

This course is distinct from the separately available course Suitability, Reg BI & AI-Based Recommendations, which addresses how AI-generated recommendations interact with these standards. This course focuses on the Reg BI framework comprehensively as a standalone subject, without an AI focus.

This two-hour IAR CE course provides investment adviser representatives, supervisors, compliance professionals and investment adviser executives with a comprehensive overview of the SEC’s amendments to Regulation S-P. The course explains the key rule changes, including the requirement to adopt a written incident response program, enhanced customer notification obligations, and expanded oversight of service providers. Participants will gain practical guidance on implementing policies and procedures, updating compliance manuals, and conducting defensible internal reviews aligned with regulatory expectations. Through case studies, the course highlights common deficiencies and how firms can mitigate regulatory and operational risks. The course is designed to equip attendees with actionable steps to strengthen data protection, incident response, and vendor oversight practices within their organizations.

Regulation S-P is the backbone of client data privacy in the investment advisory space. Built on the foundation of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), it requires investment advisers to adopt policies and procedures designed to safeguard customer information and to provide transparency about how that information is collected, used, shared, and protected. The regulation isn't just about compliance - it's a reflection of the fiduciary duty advisers owe their clients and their clients' trust.This course outlines the essential elements of Regulation S-P and related privacy expectations, drawing from real-world enforcement actions, SEC guidance, and best practices. It is tailored for new and experienced advisers who want to confidently understand and apply the law to their day-to-day operations.

This course will focus on the regulations that affect investment adviser representatives (IARs).

This course explores how generative AI is reshaping the securities industry, from client communications and compliance oversight to trading strategies and risk management. Students will learn how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and large language models work, along with the regulatory obligations firms must follow when using AI tools. The course also highlights AI-driven fraud risks such as deepfakes and unregistered trading platforms, while providing safeguards to protect investors and firms. By the end, learners will understand both the opportunities and challenges of AI, and how to balance innovation with compliance and ethical oversight

Your job is too important to rest on AI hallucinations or incomplete answers. This session covers what it takes to trust AI's output for both client data and outside research. Attendees will learn to prepare data before AI reads it as clean, structured, and in context. To help meet regulatory expectations, advisors will learn to judge the reliability of any dataset or source before trusting what AI says about it. They'll also see why AI errors are so hard to catch: wrong answers arrive just as polished and confident as right ones.

The fix comes from the audit world — black-box testing: validating a system without knowing how it works inside. Regulatory expectations around AI-assisted work are rising, and this diligence is how you meet them. Attendees leave with a methodology: how to prepare data, how to assess reliability, and how to design their own tests for AI output. That way you can spot red flags and fix them before they impact your operations, raise compliance concerns, or worse still, reach a client.

This quiz includes the following articles: Maximizing Split-Interest Charitable Deductions With New Pooled Income Funds Over CRTs, and Can A Charitable Remainder UniTrust (CRUT) Truly Replace The Benefits Of The 'Stretch' IRA?

This quiz includes the following articles: (1) Equity Compensation Planning as a Niche: Market Opportunities and Differentiated Value and (2) Investing a Roth IRA in Early Stage Growth Companies without Violating Prohibited Transaction Rules