60 seconds with Lauren Locker

Newly elected chair of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors

When Ron Rhoades made the shocking decision to step down as chair-elect of NAPFA following a compliance error at his RIA, Lauren Locker, a NAPFA board member, quickly stepped into the role Sept. 1.

REP.: Ron had about three months for it to sink in and prepare for the transition, but you’re having get up to speed pretty quick. How are you going about doing that?

Lauren Locker: When this position came up, it really for me was a matter of just moving from one chair to the next chair. So it wasn’t something that was like, ‘Oh wow, what am I going to do? This is a crazy thing. What am I thinking?’ It was a natural thing for it to happen.

Going into it, I had a keen awareness of everything that needs to be done on the board, what issues we were facing, and how things were going along. At the point that I became the chair, it then was, ‘Let’s get committees going.’ I set a phone call with each person on the board, had conversations with everybody about what they wanted to do in the upcoming year. I sat with the policy committee and those that are members of the coalition to get further up to speed on the Bachus bill and the Waters bill and the issues that surrounded them. My life has changed significantly since the day after Labor Day.

REP.: What will you be working on as chairman of NAPFA?

LL: We have a lot of internal things that we have to finish. We have a peer review process that we’re looking at implementing; it’s going through a beta test. We have education issues to look at. Do we still want to have these kind of brick-and-mortar conferences and how many? Do we want to add iconferences as a possibility for our membership to get their continuing education credits?

REP.: Ron has been very vocal about his opposition to FINRA as the SRO for advisors. Are you going to be as vocal as he?

LL: I think we probably don’t need more than one vocal Ron Rhoades. Does it make more sense that we become a crowd roaring? I’m not sure. Ron has and will continuing to do an outstanding job of being vocal, representing what our organization feels. We all do feel that way. No one is really a fan of allowing FINRA to become the SRO for us.