From a possible rollback of the pay-to-play rule to a $300 million lesson in due diligence, this week’s news is a reminder that regulatory relief and enforcement risk often arrive side by side. Here are five stories worth your attention, with plenty more in this week’s roundup:

• SEC proposes scrapping the IA pay-to-play rule: Rescinding Rule 206(4)-5 would eliminate the two-year compensation ban and related requirements. Until the proposal is adopted, advisers should keep their current policies in place.
• A $300 million due diligence lesson: The SEC found that an adviser and its CEO breached their fiduciary duties by ignoring red flags in a fund liquidation strategy that ended in steep losses after a SPAC deal.
• Repeated exam findings lead to a Reg SCI penalty: A trading platform operator agreed to a $575,000 penalty after years of unaddressed cybersecurity and systems policy deficiencies.
• CFTC flags “mention markets”: A staff advisory warns that event contracts tied to what people say or where they appear carry elevated manipulation risk.
• IPOs are back: SEC data show 208 IPOs raising more than $137 billion, up from 180 IPOs raising about $27 billion in the same period of 2025.

And that’s not all. Also in this week’s roundup: a $1.2 million FINRA restitution order over UIT supervision, the SEC EXAMS director’s push for more transparent exams, ESMA’s new supervisory priority on AI and tokenisation, and fresh data on pay, flexibility, and retention in financial services. Read the full update from FiSolve here.