Checking out BrokerCheck, a data analysis yields a breakdown of which financial advisory firms' professionals earned charges (and acquittals) for a various range of accusations.
We tracked FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which maps and tracks the professional relationships of thousands of brokers and investment advisers in our KgBase platform. First, we mapped networks of employer relationships; now, we're able to dive further into data and examine which financial advisors' staff have racked up the most cases in BrokerCheck. Because FINRA doesn't disclose a timeframe, this is a snapshot of how the financial advisory industry's professionals report professional and legal issues, rather than a broader scope.
Of the investment firm employees we tracked, 862 had criminal charges and 4521 people were permanently barred.
Below, we have a table that summarizes key data points that we can extrapolate from the KgBase chart above. According to FINRA, these companies employ, or employed, brokers who had regulatory events and/or complaints such as 'pled guilty; pleaded guilty; convicted; probation; sentenced;' or 'deferred adjudication.' In their dispositions, and these dispositions do not contain keywords like 'dismissed; not guilty; amended; dropped; reduced' or 'withdrawn.'
While our knowledge graph tracks other factors prospective investors may want to consider before backing a particular manager, like customer disputes, we've also broken out a table of which firms were affiliated with the greatest number of regulatory events and/or complaints over the snapshot we could read in FINRA's data:
| Firm Name | Count |
|---|---|
| PFS INVESTMENTS INC. | 153 |
| LPL FINANCIAL LLC | 105 |
| EDWARD JONES | 89 |
| AMERIPRISE FINANCIAL SERVICES, LLC | 81 |
| WELLS FARGO CLEARING SERVICES, LLC | 79 |
| ALLSTATE FINANCIAL SERVICES, LLC | 78 |
| MORGAN STANLEY | 64 |
| J.P. MORGAN SECURITIES LLC | 57 |
| MERRILL LYNCH, PIERCE, FENNER & SMITH INCORPORATED | 57 |
| STATE FARM VP MANAGEMENT CORP. | 56 |
The data is derived from FINRA’s BrokerCheck database; the agency has surveillance oversight of the majority of the listed equities market and provides regulatory services by contract to exchanges like NYSE and Nasdaq.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.
