What You Must Know
- Life insurers paid a mean upfront fee of 6.8% for the variable annuities Lent bought.
- The SEC says he ought to have thought-about providing the purchasers fee-based annuities.
- The SEC additionally objected to the cash market fund he used.
The U.S. Securities and Change Fee instructed an funding advisor that he ought to have thought-about fee-based variable annuities together with commission-based variable annuities when making product suggestions.
The SEC stated Monday that it has accepted a $1.1 million settlement supply from the advisor, Raymond Lawrence Lent, in reference to considerations about Lent’s compensation disclosures for variable annuities and cash market funds and considerations in regards to the potential results of compensation on his annuity suggestions and cash market fund choice choices.
Lent, the founding father of Putney Monetary, agreed to the settlement with out admitting or denying the SEC’s findings.
“I’m glad the problem has been resolved satisfactorily,” Lent stated in an interview. “We cooperated with the SEC from the start.”
The settlement was the results of considerations that turned up when the SEC carried out a routine cycle examination, and it concerned operations that had gone via earlier exams with out incident, Lent stated.
Since 1997, Putnam has been a hybrid follow that has acquired each commissions and costs, and the cumulative compensation has been properly throughout the norms for comparable companies, he added.
Raymond Lent: Lent started as an agent at Mutual Life Insurance coverage Co. of New York and a registered securities gross sales consultant at MONY’s securities arm in 1976.
He began Putney, a San Rafael, California-based registered funding advisor, in 1996.
Lent famous within the interview that Putney and its broker-dealer affiliate, Portsmouth Monetary Companies, have labored with hundreds of purchasers, and that, in some instances, members of 4 totally different generations from the identical household are doing enterprise with Putney and Portsmouth.
The SEC’s views: The SEC examined Putney in September 2019 and in addition reviewed operations later, in accordance with the SEC order describing the settlement.
The SEC discovered that, from April 2016 via October 2021, Putney beneficial variable annuities that paid Portsmouth upfront gross sales commissions equal to a mean of about 6.8% of the quantity invested.