A Small Firm With a Big Compliance Problem

Investments for You, Inc. has been registered with FINRA since 1992. Based in Marysville, Ohio, the firm operates with seven registered representatives and sells financial products directly to retail investors on what regulators call an “application-way basis,” meaning individual clients applying for specific products. These are ordinary people trying to grow their savings, plan for retirement, or protect their families financially. The firm held their trust. It violated it systematically.

• FINRA Case No. 2021069377402 was opened after a routine firm examination, the kind regulators conduct to make sure brokers are following the rules. What they found was a pattern of failures spanning years.
• The firm’s violations cover four distinct categories: failure to implement Regulation Best Interest (Reg BI) compliance; failure to build a supervisory system for Form CRS; actively lying on that Form CRS about disciplinary history; and stonewalling FINRA investigators for nearly four months.
• The violations span from June 30, 2020 through September 11, 2024, a period of over four years in which clients had no institutional protection guaranteeing their advisor was legally required to act in their interest.
• FINRA’s settlement, signed January 8, 2025, resulted in a $25,000 fine and a censure. The firm neither admitted nor denied the findings, which is standard AWC practice, but it also cannot publicly claim the charges lack a factual basis.

What a Lie on a Form Actually Costs a Real Person

Picture someone in Marysville, Ohio. Maybe they are in their mid-50s. They have worked their whole life, and now they are finally thinking seriously about what retirement looks like. They sit down with a registered representative from Investments for You. The firm hands them a form. The form is supposed to tell them the truth about who they are dealing with, whether this firm has ever been in trouble with regulators, whether the people asking for their money have ever had legal problems with the law.

The form says no. No disciplinary history. Clean record.

That was a lie.

What the form should have said, and what the firm knew and chose to hide, was that as far back as 1999, Investments for You had already been disciplined. They were caught running a securities business while failing to maintain their legally required minimum capital. That means they were taking in clients and their money at a time when they did not even have the financial floor regulators require to be in the business safely. And the CEO himself was a respondent in that same action.

When you go to a financial advisor, you are not just handing over money. You are handing over trust. You are trusting that the person across the table from you has cleared a professional and legal bar worth respecting. The entire purpose of Form CRS, the entire reason the SEC created it, is so that ordinary people can make an informed choice. Informed consent, in the financial sense. Investments for You took that choice away from every client they served from August 2020 through July 2022, because those clients were reading a document that contained a deliberate falsehood.

And then there is the Regulation Best Interest failure, which ran even longer. From June 2020 through September 2024, the firm had no written policies requiring its representatives to recommend what was actually best for the client, not what paid the representative more. There was no system to check. No paper trail. No oversight. If a representative decided to steer a retiree toward a higher-commission product that served the rep’s wallet over the client’s future, there was no internal mechanism to catch it, flag it, or stop it. The firm was warned about this in April 2021 and again in May 2022, and it did nothing. For two more years, clients continued receiving recommendations with no institutional guarantee those recommendations were made in their interest.

The $25,000 fine will not reach the people who sat across from those representatives. It will not audit what products were sold, and to whom, and at what cost to their retirement security. The case does not include a single word about restitution. The victims, if there were any, are not in this document. Their names never made it in. Their losses, if they happened, remain uncounted.

“There was no system to supervise for compliance with Reg BI.” The firm had been selling to retail investors for over four years with zero institutional safeguard requiring anyone to put the client first.

Straight From the Document: What They Admitted

These are direct quotes from FINRA AWC No. 2021069377402. None of this is paraphrased.

“From June 30, 2020, to September 11, 2024, Investments for You failed to establish and maintain written policies and procedures, and a supervisory system, reasonably designed to achieve compliance with Securities Exchange Act of 1934 Rule 15l-1 (Regulation Best Interest or Reg BI). As a result, the firm willfully violated Exchange Act Rule 15l-l(a)(1) and violated FINRA Rules 3110 and 2010.” FINRA AWC No. 2021069377402, Overview Section

• The word “willfully” is not regulatory boilerplate. Under securities law, a willful violation means the firm knew it was required to comply and chose not to. This is not an oversight. This is a sustained, knowing refusal to implement client protections over a period of four-plus years.
• FINRA Rules 3110 and 2010 are the backbone of industry self-regulation. Rule 3110 requires firms to have a real supervisory system. Rule 2010 requires “high standards of commercial honor and just and equitable principles of trade.” Breaking both, willfully, for over four years is the opposite of honoring your clients.

“Investments for You falsely responded ‘No’ to the Form CRS question concerning legal or disciplinary history. The firm was required to respond ‘Yes,’ because both the firm and its Chief Executive Officer had prior disciplinary history.” FINRA AWC No. 2021069377402, Overview Section

• The document is explicit: the lie was on a form handed directly to retail clients. The purpose of Form CRS is consumer protection. Falsifying it means every client who received that form during the period August 27, 2020 to July 6, 2022 made decisions based on false information about who they were dealing with.
• The CEO was personally named in the 1999 disciplinary action, which was already recorded in FINRA’s own CRD database and BrokerCheck. The firm had no excuse for not knowing. The settlement confirms the disclosures “were made by or were available to the firm.”

“FINRA advised the firm in April 2021, and then again in May 2022, that the firm was required to implement written policies and procedures relating to Reg BI. Nonetheless, the firm failed to establish and maintain any such policies or procedures until September 12, 2024.” FINRA AWC No. 2021069377402, Facts and Violative Conduct Section A

• This confirms that the failure to comply was not due to ignorance. FINRA told them directly, twice, with a gap of over a year between the warnings. The firm operated for approximately two additional years after the second warning before implementing anything.
• The warnings themselves came from FINRA’s own firm examinations, routine check-ins that exist precisely to catch this kind of problem. The system worked; the firm defied it.

“For nearly four months — from May 22, 2024, to September 12, 2024 — Investments for You failed to provide any information or documents responsive to two request letters that FINRA issued pursuant to FINRA Rule 8210.” FINRA AWC No. 2021069377402, Facts and Violative Conduct Section D

• FINRA Rule 8210 is the regulator’s most basic enforcement tool: the right to demand records. Refusing to respond is not a gray area. The firm was ultimately suspended before it produced a single document.
• The firm only responded on September 13, 2024, after its membership was suspended on July 26, 2024, and after it received notice it would be expelled from the industry on October 7, 2024, if it did not act. The compliance came after consequences threatened to end the business entirely.

“Pursuant to the General Principles Applicable to all Sanction Determinations contained in FINRA’s Sanction Guidelines, FINRA imposed a lower fine in this case after it considered, among other things, Respondent’s revenues and financial resources.” FINRA AWC No. 2021069377402, Footnote 4

• FINRA explicitly reduced the fine because the firm claimed limited resources. The penalty was calibrated to what the firm could pay, not to what the misconduct cost the clients who received false disclosures for nearly two years or who received recommendations without any best-interest safeguard for over four.
• There is no mechanism in this settlement for any client harmed during this period to recover anything. The $25,000 goes to FINRA, not to a restitution fund.

Who Actually Pays When a Broker Ignores the Rules

Public Health

Financial insecurity is a documented public health crisis. When retail investors, particularly retirees and near-retirees, receive unsuitable product recommendations without any institutional safeguard, the downstream effects are measurable and severe.

• The absence of Reg BI policies means there was no firm-level mechanism to flag recommendations that might leave clients over-exposed to risk, under-liquid for medical emergencies, or locked into products with withdrawal penalties during critical health moments. Any client who received a bad recommendation during this period had no internal advocate inside the firm.
• Financial stress is directly linked to elevated cortisol, cardiovascular disease, depression, and anxiety disorders. A retiree who discovers that their savings were mismanaged, or that the disclosure form they relied on when choosing their advisor contained a lie, faces a compounded harm: financial loss and the psychological damage of betrayed trust in a system they had no real tools to audit themselves.
• Older adults are disproportionately targeted by unsuitable financial products, and a firm without any Reg BI compliance infrastructure is a firm where that targeting can happen without detection. The people most likely to be harmed are the least positioned to recover financially from it.

Economic Inequality

Regulation Best Interest exists precisely because there is a structural power imbalance between a financial professional and a retail investor. When a firm removes the only institutional check on that imbalance, the people hurt are always those without the wealth or legal resources to protect themselves.

• Retail investors, by definition, are not institutional clients with compliance teams, independent advisors, or the legal bandwidth to sue a broker-dealer. They are ordinary people relying on the regulatory framework to do its job. When the firm eliminates that framework internally for four-plus years, it is the working-class and middle-class client, not the wealthy one, who has no recourse.
• The $25,000 fine is a fraction of any reasonable estimate of revenue generated during four-plus years of operating without Reg BI compliance. The firm’s ability to pay was considered in determining the sanction, meaning the financial consequence was calibrated to protect the firm’s viability, not to restore any harm done to clients.
• No restitution was ordered. No client was made whole. The settlement contains zero mechanism for any retail investor who received recommendations from June 2020 through September 2024 to find out whether those recommendations were appropriate, whether better options existed, or whether they were steered toward higher-commission products without a required best-interest analysis ever being performed.
• The firm’s 1999 disciplinary action for operating below minimum net capital is itself an economic inequality issue: an undercapitalized firm is a firm with limited ability to make clients whole if something goes wrong. Clients who discovered that history on Form CRS, had it been disclosed honestly, might have chosen a better-capitalized firm. That choice was taken from them.

What the Fine Translates to in Real Terms

Who to Hold Accountable and How to Protect Yourself

The settlement identifies specific individuals and institutions responsible for these violations. Here is who is named and where to direct pressure.

Key Figures Named in the Settlement

• Investments for You, Inc., President: The AWC was signed by the firm’s president (identified in the settlement signature block as Max Chrisman, Title: President). He signed on behalf of the firm, accepted the findings voluntarily, and specifically waived the right to deny the factual basis of any of these charges.
• Chief Executive Officer (Unnamed in Overview, Named Implicitly): The CEO is identified throughout the document as having personal disciplinary history dating to 1999 that was withheld from clients on Form CRS. FINRA’s BrokerCheck at finra.org/brokercheck contains the full public record for both the firm (CRD No. 29257) and its principals.
• FINRA Senior Counsel Rebecca Segrest signed the acceptance on behalf of FINRA’s Director of ODA. The case is now part of Investments for You’s permanent disciplinary record.

Regulatory Watchlist

• FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority): The primary regulator for broker-dealers. File a complaint at finra.org/investors/have-problem or use FINRA’s BrokerCheck to look up Investments for You (CRD No. 29257) and review its full disciplinary history before doing business with them.
• SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission): The SEC adopted both Reg BI and Form CRS. The violations here are directly against SEC rules. File investor complaints at investor.gov/additional-resources/news-alerts/alerts-bulletins/investor-bulletin-regulation-best-interest or sec.gov/tcr.
• Ohio Division of Securities (State Regulator): As a Marysville, Ohio firm, Investments for You operates under Ohio’s jurisdiction as well. Ohio’s Division of Securities handles state-level complaints about broker conduct: com.ohio.gov/divisions/securities.
• CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau): While primarily focused on consumer lending, the CFPB tracks patterns of financial product misconduct. Reports at consumerfinance.gov/complaint help build the public record of industry-wide harm patterns.

Grassroots Action and Mutual Aid

• Check your own broker before the next meeting. Every FINRA-registered broker and firm in the United States has a public BrokerCheck profile. Go to finra.org/brokercheck right now and look up your advisor’s name and their firm. Any disciplinary action, customer complaint, or regulatory sanction is listed there. This should be non-negotiable before trusting someone with your savings.
• Ask your advisor directly: “Are you held to a fiduciary standard or a suitability standard?” Registered investment advisors are held to fiduciary duty always. Broker-dealers under Reg BI are held to best-interest standard, which is stronger than the old suitability standard but still falls short of full fiduciary duty. Know which applies to you.
• Organize at the local level. If you are part of a union, a community organization, a church group, or a mutual aid network, share BrokerCheck’s existence with your community. Older adults in working-class communities are the most likely to be targeted by unsuitable financial products and the least likely to know this public resource exists.
• Demand restitution requirements in FINRA settlements. Contact your congressional representatives and ask them to push for mandatory restitution provisions in FINRA enforcement settlements, particularly in cases involving falsified consumer disclosures. FINRA is an industry self-regulatory organization; its enforcement priorities are shaped by political and public pressure.
• If you were a client of Investments for You between June 2020 and September 2024, consult with a securities attorney about whether the products recommended to you were appropriate and whether any harm is recoverable. FINRA arbitration is one avenue; many securities attorneys offer free initial consultations.