SEC

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is the federal securities regulator and one of the two primary regulators (alongside CFTC) whose perimeter materially affects how FintechPays grades U.S. affiliate programs. SEC supervision matters in three concrete ways we surface in U.S. program reviews: investment-adviser registration (the gating regime for robo-advisors), broker-dealer registration (for stock/ETF and crypto brokerage programs), and the Marketing Rule (Rule 206(4)-1, in force November 2022) which sets the disclosure language that registered investment advisers must use when paying or receiving compensation for endorsements — affiliate commissions included.

For the affiliate side specifically, the SEC Marketing Rule is a hard rule, not a soft norm. A registered investment adviser whose affiliate program pays commission to a creator must disclose the compensation arrangement, and the creator’s promotional content must carry the prescribed disclosure language. FintechPays publishes per-niche disclosure templates that meet the rule; reviewers covering SEC-registered programs should lift them verbatim rather than improvise. For programs that aren’t SEC-registered but operate adjacent to securities (e.g., crypto exchanges where the asset-status question is unresolved), we note the regulatory ambiguity in the trust band and grade accordingly.

We verify SEC registration via the IAPD database (for investment advisers) and BrokerCheck (for broker-dealers) before publishing the SEC pill on a program card. A claim of “SEC-regulated” without an IARD/CRD number is not the same as a registration we can verify; we ask for it.