Message from the Chief Regulatory Operations Officer
FINRA's mission to protect investors and promote market integrity drives everything we do, including our commitment to transparency and collaboration with our member firms. Whenever possible, we share actionable insights from our oversight activities to help firms enhance their resiliency and strengthen their compliance programs. Of all the publications we deliver, this Annual Regulatory Oversight Report is the most anticipated, with the greatest engagement of any of our resources. This year we have worked to publish the report even earlier, in response to feedback from our members, who have told us what a valued resource it is for their annual compliance planning. The 2026 report includes new and updated content on cyber-enabled fraud, senior investors and trends in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), among other topics. These insights from our oversight activities—combined with other intelligence—are designed to help member firms identify emerging risks and implement effective controls as needed.
This year’s report also highlights progress on our FINRA Forward initiative, launched this spring. A key tenet of FINRA Forward is empowering member firm compliance. This includes offering more conferences, events and other tools; it also means strengthening the feedback loop from FINRA’s regulatory programs to our member firms. That is a key goal of this report: by sharing intelligence about key risks and emerging challenges, we can help our members enhance their compliance capabilities and proactively address potential issues before they become compliance failures.
FINRA Forward also reflects our commitment to continuous organizational improvement. This has included reviewing and enhancing our organizational structure to align to the demands of our mission, including integrating our core regulatory programs into a unified Regulatory Operations function. This integration will support more effective collaboration across our regulatory programs, resulting in more coordinated interactions with our member firms, expanded intelligence sharing across departments, more integrated processes and technology, and enhanced capacity to respond to the ever-evolving risks to investors and markets. The continuing integration of FINRA’s regulatory programs is reflected in the report, which draws on insights from across the Member Supervision, Market Oversight (formerly Market Regulation) and Enforcement teams.
We value your feedback on how we can improve the report to make it more useful for our members. Please share your thoughts and suggestions by email.
Sincerely,
Greg Ruppert