What It Feels Like to Be the Product

You are 24 years old. You are trying to start investing for the first time because every piece of content you have ever seen tells you the stock market is how regular people build wealth. You are scrolling your feed and someone you follow, someone whose taste you trust, who has talked you through everything from budgeting to side hustles, tells you they use this app called Public. It is free, they say. Zero commission fees. You can even buy fractions of expensive stocks, which means you do not need to be rich to start. This person is not a banker. They are just like you. So you click the link.

What you do not know, because nobody told you, is that the person who just gave you that recommendation was paid to say it. You do not know that “commission free” does not mean “no fees.” You do not know that the fractional shares you are about to buy cannot be moved to a different broker-dealer if you ever want to switch; you will have to sell them first, realizing a taxable event on your terms, not yours. You do not know any of this because the company that built this influencer program did not require its paid promoters to tell you.

The betrayal here is layered. It starts with the platform, which built a customer acquisition engine using social trust as its primary fuel. It runs through the influencers, many of whom may not have known exactly what compliance standards they were supposed to meet. And it lands on the investor, the person who clicked the link, funded the account, and made a financial decision based on a pitch that regulators later found was misleading.

Over 23,000 accounts were opened and funded through influencer referral links during this period. Those are not abstract numbers. Those are people who made real financial decisions. Each one of them encountered a version of “this app is free and easy” without the footnotes that change what “free and easy” actually means. The $350,000 fine that Public Investing ultimately paid works out to roughly $15.22 per affected account. That is the dollar value the regulatory system placed on each instance of a misleading pitch reaching a real person trying to navigate a financial system that was already stacked against them.

The firm corrected its written supervisory procedures in March 2023, more than three years after the influencer program launched. Every one of those accounts opened in those three years represents someone who made a decision in an information environment the company controlled and chose not to police.

Three Years of Unpoliced Promotion

What the Regulators Actually Found, Word for Word

The following are direct quotes from FINRA AWC No. 2021072581501. Nothing has been paraphrased or embellished.

• This confirms the program was not casual. Public Investing designed and ran a structured, compensated sales network. The influencers were, functionally, an unlicensed sales force paid on performance with no earnings cap.
• The firm selected influencers based on how relevant their existing content was to its business, meaning the people chosen were already positioned to make a financial pitch sound credible and organic to their audience.

• The company wrote the script. The “Content Creator Kit” and talking points gave influencers pre-approved messaging. This is the definition of FINRA’s “entanglement” standard, meaning these posts were legally the firm’s own communications, subject to the same disclosure requirements as a formal advertisement.
• The talking point about “$0 commission fees” was technically narrow. Regulators found that posts using this language did not disclose that other fees may apply or link to the firm’s fee schedule, which FINRA had explicitly flagged in Regulatory Notice 13-23 as a violation of its rules on “free” claims.

• This omission matters enormously for first-time investors. If you buy fractional shares and later want to move your portfolio to a different brokerage, you may be forced to sell those fractions first, creating a taxable event you did not plan for and potentially losing value in the process.
• The selling point of fractional shares is accessibility for people with limited capital. The hidden limitation disproportionately affects exactly the lower-income, first-time investors that the platform was marketing to.

• Federal securities law (Exchange Act Rule 17a-4) requires broker-dealers to preserve all public communications for at least three years. Public Investing failed this requirement for the entire life of its influencer program.
• Without preserved records, there is no way to audit the full scope of what was said to investors. The public and regulators are left working from a partial picture of what actually reached 23,000+ new account holders.

“Several posts also failed to clearly identify the communications as paid advertisements.”
FINRA AWC No. 2021072581501

Who Actually Pays When Regulation Fails

Public Health of Personal Finance

Financial harm is a public health issue. When people make investment decisions based on misleading information, the damage compounds over time and rarely shows up in a single line item.

• First-time investors who funded accounts after seeing undisclosed paid ads were operating with corrupted information at the exact moment they were forming their investing habits. Bad early experiences with markets, particularly ones caused by hidden fees or frozen assets, drive people away from investing entirely, widening the wealth gap further.
• The fractional share lock-in issue is particularly acute for low-income investors. If you cannot afford to buy whole shares, you are likely buying fractional ones. If those shares cannot be transferred when you need to switch brokers or liquidate in an emergency, you face forced sales and potential tax liabilities you did not budget for.
• 23,000+ people opened and funded accounts through referral links. Each one made a capital commitment, even a small one, based on an information environment the platform controlled and chose not to clean up for over three years.
• The influencer program specifically targeted younger, less financially experienced audiences. Regulatory Notice 17-18, which FINRA had already published in 2017, made clear that social media influencer posts required disclosure. Public Investing launched its program three years after that guidance and ignored it anyway.

The firm did not limit the compensation influencers could earn. During this period, customers opened and funded more than 23,000 new accounts using the unique referral links provided to influencers.
FINRA AWC No. 2021072581501

Economic Inequality

The design of this influencer program systematically extracted value from people with less financial sophistication and fewer resources to absorb mistakes.

• Unlimited influencer compensation created direct financial incentive to recruit as many new accounts as possible, regardless of whether those accounts belonged to people who fully understood what they were signing up for. Volume was the business model. Accuracy was optional.
• The regulatory fine of $350,000 is a cost of doing business for a venture-backed fintech startup, not a punishment that changes behavior. At $15.22 per affected account, it does not compensate a single investor for any harm suffered, and the settlement explicitly prevents FINRA from pursuing future action on these specific facts.
• People who came to the platform through influencers they trusted, and who were misled about fees or fractional share restrictions, had no practical legal recourse. Individual investors cannot afford to sue a broker-dealer over small account balances. The regulatory settlement is the only accountability mechanism that existed, and it paid out nothing to investors.
• The “Content Creator Kit” talking points emphasized features that appeal to people with less capital: zero commission on standard trades, fractional shares. These are real benefits, but they were deployed without the disclosures that would let investors evaluate the full picture. Accessibility as a sales pitch, stripped of the information needed to make it real.

What the Fine Actually Means in Human Terms

The Watchlist and Your Next Move

The settlement is signed. The fine is paid. Here is who still has jurisdiction and what you can do right now.

Key Parties on Record

• Stephen Sikes, CEO, Open to the Public Investing, Inc. Signed the AWC settlement on May 27, 2025. Under the settlement, a member of senior management who is a registered principal must certify in writing within 60 days that the firm has fixed its compliance systems.
• Saumya Manohar, General Counsel, Open to the Public Investing, Inc. Reviewed the AWC on behalf of the firm. Address of record: 6 Harrison St., Floor 5, New York, NY 10013.
• Leah Milbauer, Principal Counsel, FINRA Department of Enforcement, Boston. The officer responsible for receiving Public Investing’s remediation certification. Contact: leah.milbauer@finra.org.

Regulatory Watchlist

• FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority): The body that brought this action. BrokerCheck (finra.org/brokercheck) lists all prior regulatory events for this firm. Public Investing’s AWC is now part of its permanent disciplinary record.
• SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission): The Exchange Act violations found in this AWC, specifically the record-keeping failures under Section 17(a) and Rule 17a-4, fall within SEC jurisdiction. The SEC can pursue its own enforcement independent of FINRA.
• FTC (Federal Trade Commission): The FTC enforces rules on paid endorsements and influencer disclosures under its Endorsement Guides. Undisclosed paid influencer posts are also an FTC issue, separate from the FINRA violations. The FTC’s complaint portal is at ftc.gov/complaint.
• CFPB (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau): Has jurisdiction over consumer financial products and unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts and practices. Misleading advertising for brokerage accounts targeting retail investors falls within its remit. File a complaint at consumerfinance.gov/complaint.

What You Can Do

• If you opened a Public Investing account through an influencer referral link between January 2020 and September 2022, document it. Screenshot the original post if it still exists, note the account opening date, and note any fees you paid. This documentation matters if further regulatory action broadens the scope of relief.
• File a complaint with the CFPB and FTC if you believe you were misled by an influencer post that did not disclose it was paid advertising. Both agencies track complaint volume, and volume drives enforcement priority.
• When you see a financial influencer post, check the description for #ad, #sponsored, or #paidpartnership disclosures before acting on any recommendation. If those disclosures are missing, report the post to the platform and to the FTC.
• Connect with local investor protection organizations and financial literacy nonprofits in your area. The systemic failure here, the fact that a three-year-long undisclosed ad campaign required no investor compensation, is an organizing issue, not just a compliance one.
• Share this investigation. The fine amounts to less than a mid-level employee’s annual salary at a New York fintech. The 23,000+ people who funded accounts deserve to know what the fine bought them: nothing.

How It Was Supposed to Work vs. What Actually Happened