In Practice July 16, 2007

PLANSPONSOR to Commence Fourth Year of Honoring Advisers

This September, PLANSPONSOR will again open its annual nomination process for its Retirement Plan Adviser and Adviser Team of the Year awards.
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The 2008 Retirement Plan Adviser and Adviser Team of the Year awards will be presented at PLANSPONSOR‘s annual industry awards dinner in spring 2008.

The award, launched in 2005, recognizes the contributions of the nation’s best financial advisers in helping make retirement security a reality for workers across the nation. Finalists are evaluated based on a qualitative evaluation drawn from interviews with plan sponsor clients of those advisers who emerged as superior from a quantitative evaluation of their current service levels.

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The 2007 PLANSPONSOR Retirement Plan Adviser of the Year is Chad Larsen, with Moreton Financial Solutions, a member firm of National Retirement Partners in Denver, Colorado, and the 2007 PLANSPONSOR Retirement Plan Adviser Team of the Year is Steve Wilt and The STAR Group with Merrill Lynch in Akron, Ohio. These advisers were chosen from a pool of more than 300 nominations. More information on the award can be found at http://www.planadviser.com/article.php/255.

Previous winners of the award include Dorann Cafaro of The Cafaro Group, and John Mott of Smith Barney.

“Advisers have become indispensable members of the team for most workplace retirement plans,’ says Nevin Adams, Editor-in-Chief of PLANSPONSOR; “That realization has been a growing component of PLANSPONSOR’s focus here the past several years. It was part of our decision to launch PLANADVISERdash in 2003, an integral aspect of the launch of the PLANSPONSOR Institute and the PLANSPONSOR Retirement Professional (PRP) designation in 2005, and an essential factor in our decision to introduce PLANADVISER magazine and PLANADVISER.com last fall.’

As part of the PLANADVISER brand, PLANSPONSOR, this fall, will hold its first conference focused solely on the needs of advisers working with employer-sponsored retirement plans. More information about the PLANADVISER National Conference, to be held in Orlando, Florida, from September 24 through 26, is at http://www.planadviser.com/panc07/.

To be notified when award nominations commence, please contact Alison Cooke, Managing Editor of PLANADVISER magazine, at acooke@plansponsor.com.

Compliance July 14, 2007

What’s In a Name?

That which we call a rose by any other name might smell as sweet – but that doesn’t mean you can call it a rose.
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This past week none other than the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) decided to back off the name it had chosen for the soon-to-be combined enforcement divisions of the NASD and the New York Stock Exchange (see the announcement). Less than a month ago NASD announced that the group would be called the Securities Industry Regulatory Authority, or SIRA. However, as it turns out SIRA sounds similar to an Arabic word that refers to the traditional biographies of Muhammad – and it didn’t take long for complaints about the similarity to begin flowing.

“We don’t want to give the impression that there was a lot of feedback, but we did get some,” NASD spokesman Howard Schloss said, according to the WSJ.

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Schloss told the WSJ that the similarity with the Arabic word was brought to the NASD’s attention – but their branding advisers told them there wouldn’t be a problem.

Last week, NASD Chairman and CEO Mary Shapiro announced that because of the feedback, the agency had determined that it “was appropriate to select the alternative name of Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or FINRA, for our new organization.’

Not that NASD’s acronym challenge is unique – when the Securities Industry Association merged with the Bond Market Association, they also took some “grief’ for their new name, albeit from a different, and much less “politically correct’ tact. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association seems appropriate enough – but the acronym, SIFMA, struck some (including NYSE Chief Executive John Thain, according to published reports) as suggestive of “certain unpleasant diseases.”

Ironically, NASD’s Mary Schapiro at the time responded by saying, “I will simply respond to the ribbing regarding the new acronym by repeating the question from Romeo and Juliet, “What’s in a name?”

Or an acronym.

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