Don’t assume you can disclose away all conflicts of interest – that’s the latest warning and reminder from the SEC to investment advisers and broker-dealers from a recently-published staff bulletin.

As a reminder, an SEC-registered adviser owes clients a fiduciary duty of loyalty to eliminate a conflict of interest or, at a minimum, make full and fair disclosure of the conflict of interest such that a client can provide informed consent to the conflict.

In the bulletin, the staff pointed out several circumstances where conflicts must be eliminated and not merely disclosed. For example, the staff believes that eliminating a conflict is appropriate where the conflict is of a nature and extent that it would be difficult for the adviser to provide full and fair disclosure, and the investment adviser cannot mitigate the conflict such that full and fair disclosure and informed consent are possible.

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Signaling its increasing scrutiny on investment advisers managing crypto assets, the SEC and CFTC recently jointly proposed a rule that would require private fund managers who are required to file Form PF to report information on digital asset investments held by their private funds.

The release defines a “digital asset” as an asset that is issued or transferred using distributed ledger or blockchain technology including, but not limited to, virtual currencies, coins, and tokens.

Among other things, reporting managers would need to provide a good faith estimate of the percentage of the reporting fund’s net asset value invested in digital assets as well as the dollar value of long and short positions in digital assets.

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