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Steven Lofchie is the Chief Legal Architect and a co-founder of Caffrey.AI, an AI platform built for law firms, banks, and the financial regulatory industry. He is also a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright, where he advises financial institutions on securities laws, the Commodity Exchange Act, and broker-dealer regulation. Ranked by Chambers USA every year since 2007, he is the author of “Lofchie’s Guide to Broker-Dealer Regulation,” long considered the leading treatise on the subject.

Recent Articles & Comments

In effect, Commissioner Johnson calls for authority along the lines that the FRB has with respect to banks; i.e., to regulate the holding company of the bank and potentially the subsidiaries of the holding company.

The banking regulators seem to materially misunderstand and overestimate the credit risk in a retail broker-dealer business. SEA  ("Customer protection-reserves and custody of securities"), which imposes strict segregation rules as to the custody of customer assets, combined with the SEC's very conservative net capital rule, SEA  ("Net capital requirements for brokers or dealers"), dictates that retail broker-dealers have a very low risk credit profile. Banks, which can make…

Commissioner Peirce's remarks are a significant contribution to the ongoing debate on regulating digital assets. While both the SEC and CFTC wish to assert authority over digital assets, neither has developed a comprehensive regulatory scheme, although each regulator ought to be capable of doing so. Rather than put forward comprehensive regulatory plans, the agencies have largely dead-ended into arguments over definitions and jurisdiction; i.e., over which agency should have authority,…

These lending programs are clearly "securities" under Reves (see  and .) While there are numerous hard cases as to what constitutes securities, the lending programs are not hard cases.