Finra adds enforcement muscle with SVP hires

Finra has beefed up its enforcement muscle by appointing two veteran experts in financial services law to fill newly created roles in its leadership.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Association announced Wednesday morning that it has appointed Julie Glynn and Tina Gubb as its new senior vice presidents of enforcement, with Gubb’s role commencing on July 22 and Glynn’s in September.

Both will report to Bill St. Louis, executive vice president and head of enforcement at Finra.

“Julie and Tina possess exemplary legal expertise, as well as superior leadership skills,” St. Louis said in a statement Wednesday.

In their newly established positions, Glynn and Gubb will serve as senior legal advisors to St. Louis, focusing on high-impact investigations and disciplinary actions.

They will also take charge of the enforcement attorney teams, each overseeing four chief counsel enforcement teams, as they work across Finra’s regulatory operations in support of its mission to protect investors and preserve the integrity of the markets.

Finra’s enforcement litigation team will also be reporting to Glynn.

“I am confident that both Julie and Tina have the breadth of experience, strategic thinking and agility needed to help lead our teams in pursuit of Finra’s mission of investor protection and market integrity,” said St. Louis.

Being appointed to the new enforcement role counts a sort of homecoming for Glynn, who previously worked at Finra from 2005 to 2011 as an enforcement attorney.

Most recently, she was general counsel for JPMorgan’s wealth management line, a role she had held since 2019. There, she and her legal team advised on various initiatives, including the creation of a new remote advisory channel and enhancements to the firm’s self-directed digital channel.

Before her earlier tenure at Finra, she also worked at Morgan Stanley and Morrison & Foerster.

Gubb record of service at Finra goes back nearly three decades to 1998, when she began as an analyst at the watchdog’s office of fraud detection and market intelligence. She has held progressively responsible roles in enforcement since 2002, working on cases of fraud, pump and dump operations, insider trading, and other violations.

As chief counsel, Gubb led and supervised high-profile investigations, including a $24 million settlement with Bank of America last November involving massive spoofing in Treasury securities and related supervisory failures.

Finra’s new hires come just a few short weeks after a Bloomberg report highlighting the industry regulator’s historically light caseload in 2023, with the number of enforcement actions going down by about half since hitting a high in 2016.

While a spokesperson for Finra argued that the dip in actions was due to a decrease in the number of bad actors across the industry, some industry observers weren’t so sure.

“Right now, there’s no big crisis going on … The tide is in, but as sure as the sun rises in the east, the tide will go out,” Brad Bennett, Finra’s enforcement director from 2011 to 2017, told Bloomberg. “And people will be wondering: Where the hell was Finra?”