The Form U4 is the basic application for any person seeking to become registered with a FINRA member firm. Although updated in 2009, the U4 is an antiquated document in need of overhaul. In order to consider revisions to the U4, it is important to understand its role in today’s financial services world. Historically, the U4 was an administrative document used by self-regulatory agencies and state agencies for determining whether to grant requests for securities licenses. While the U4 retains this original purpose, that purpose has evolved. All of the information contained within a U4 application is submitted to the Central Registration Depository system, operated by FINRA. According to FINRA, Web CRD® “contains the registration records of more than 4,015 registered broker-dealers, and the qualification, employment and disclosure histories of more than 642,980 active registered individuals.” All of the information contained on the U4 becomes public, but only some of that information is available through FINRA’s BrokerCheck® website (which obtains its information from Web CRD®). Prior to the advent of BrokerCheck®, it was very difficult for a consumer to review a broker’s background. BrokerCheck® changed that. BrokerCheck® serves as “a free tool which is part of FINRA’s ongoing efforts to help investors make informed choices about brokers and brokerage firms.”
Because the U4 serves as BrokerCheck’s template, the U4 must be evaluated in the context of one of its purposes, helping investors make informed choices about brokers. With this purpose in mind, the U4, as well as BrokerCheck®, are ripe for change.
So what information is missing from the U4 that investors would find helpful in making informed choices about brokers? The first glaring absence from the U4 is any question about the applicant’s education. The only context in which education is mentioned is in the instructions to question 12, in which an applicant is asked to provide his employment history for the past ten years. According to the instructions, if an applicant was engaged in “full time education” within the past 10 years, that information should be provided in the employment history section. The applicant is not asked whether he or she finished the sixth grade, graduated from high school or college, or has a graduate school degree. The reason this information is not requested is because the securities industry has no minimum education criteria for the various licenses that permit individuals to manage client assets. To the extent FINRA wants BrokerCheck® to help investors make informed choices, an Education History section needs to be added to the U4. How many people would knowingly trust the management of their life’s savings to a person who did not graduate from high school? Or only finished one year of college? The answer is few, if any. So why hide this information? In order for the U4, as the template for BrokerCheck®, to be relevant in the 21st century, it should be revised in order to require the disclosure of an applicant’s entire education history. Stay tuned for Part II!