On Wednesday, April 18th, the SEC introduced a much-anticipated package of proposed rules and formal guidance concerning the standards of conduct for financial professionals. The more than 1,000-page proposal, which emerged eight years after Congress required the agency to conduct a study on the topic, addresses whether investment advisers and broker-dealers should have identical or different standards of conduct vis-à-vis their retail customers. Covington recently published this alert, which takes a look at the four key parts of the SEC’s proposal and provides a brief overview of how the proposal interacts with the DOL fiduciary rule.