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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

Commissioner Gensler reports that in 1963, financial services accounted for 3.5% of the U.S. economy, while today it accounts for about 8%. He also cites to a 2014 study, which he describes as reporting that the "costs of financial intermediation . . . were as high in 2014 as they were in 1900." The message behind these numbers is that financial services are too great a part of the economy with the implicit assumption that costs of financial services are effectively a tax or a drag on the U…

The questions asked are perfectly reasonable, but they are not the most important questions and they are not directed to the most important regulator. The letter begins with the assumptions that the digital asset markets are growing and that there is some level of fraud in those markets (both of which assumptions are certainly true) and essentially asks what the CFTC is going to do about it. While many digital assets may be "commodities," and therefore the CFTC has antifraud jurisdiction,…

Although the report and the recommendations concerned the activities of the government regulators, and not of private parties, institutions that collect PII may find the structure of the report (including the framework set out on pages 6-8) useful for considering how well they protect PII, particularly given the possible penalty for failure to do so. The report is largely based on OMB Circular A-130, which describes "," and provides more detailed guidance as to the protection of information.…

Given the significance of blockchain networks and utility tokens in absolute size, and their potential significance to the 21st century global economy, it is time for the SEC to move past "like should be treated alike" and on to "one size does not fit all." Congress should consider providing any necessary direction. Such legislation might be very simple; something along the lines of the following:

Study - The SEC shall conduct a study to evaluate:

(1)…