Massachusetts investors deserve protection, not press releases

In Waltham and across Massachusetts, seniors are encouraged to trust established institutions with their life savings. But when bank-affiliated advisers profit from sales-driven recommendations, when customers are barred from court and pushed into forced arbitration, and when state regulators fail to act, that trust becomes a trap.

My father, a longtime Waltham resident, trusted his bank. It cost him half his life savings – and ultimately his life.

My parents were nearing retirement when their local bank steered them to work with a financial adviser. My parents agreed to pay substantial advisory fees, believing they would receive objective guidance in return. Instead, they were sold advice shaped by conflicts of interest – investments that generated hidden sales commissions for the adviser while inflicting devastating losses on my parents.

When my father learned the truth, he wanted to fight back. But like most Americans, he had unknowingly signed a forced arbitration agreement, leaving him with no right to go to court. His only option was a private forum controlled by the financial industry itself.

The loss of his savings was crushing. The loss of his legal rights was worse. He took his own life before he could see me get married or meet his grandchildren.

After his death, the Boston Globe reported our family’s story in March 2011. In response, Massachusetts’ top securities regulator, Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, publicly vowed to investigate the broker involved. We believed accountability would follow. We believed Massachusetts had one of the toughest securities regulators.

We were wrong.

Over the next eight years, Secretary Galvin and the Securities Division sat on the case. They never interviewed our family or reached out with a single question. I spent hundreds of hours compiling evidence – account records, expert reports and legal analysis prepared by a former securities regulator – yet access logs showed they never even opened most of what we sent them.

In February 2019, the case was quietly closed.

Over the following year, I repeatedly followed up – calling, emailing and personally going to the State House – but not a single person in Galvin’s office would meet with me. The public pledge to protect Massachusetts seniors from deceptive financial practices quietly evaporated.

Galvin is now seeking a ninth term.

Secretary Galvin has cultivated a reputation as one of the toughest securities regulators in the country. He has appeared in taxpayer-funded advertisements encouraging residents to file complaints, and he has touted his enforcement victories in voter guides.

But the results tell a different story.

Massachusetts has roughly 26,000 registered financial advisers. They are expected to act in their clients’ best interest when giving advice – and customers assume they do. But most are licensed as brokers and can collect commissions on the very products they recommend. These built-in conflicts, largely invisible to consumers, often lead to biased advice and financial harm.

Yet oversight is minimal. In all of 2025, the Securities Division, with roughly 20 attorneys, brought just three enforcement actions statewide. All of them were settled out of court, with the largest returning just a few hundred thousand dollars to Massachusetts investors – roughly $17 of restitution per customer. That was the full extent of securities enforcement in Massachusetts last year.

The gap between appearance and reality runs deeper. In a public-records response, the Securities Division admitted that it had “no way of tracking and/or storing the online complaint forms” – the very complaints it urges residents to file through taxpayer-funded ads. Encouraging the public to report wrongdoing, while failing to track or act on those reports, is not accountability. It is inexcusable.

My family’s experience is not an isolated failure. Financial advisers operate in a system where conflicts of interest are routine, disputes are funneled into industry-controlled arbitration, and outcomes are hidden behind hush agreements. This is exactly where strong enforcement matters most. Instead, Massachusetts seniors have gotten public relations in place of public protection.

If Secretary Galvin truly wanted to protect investors, he would ban the conflicts of interest that corrupt financial advice: commissions, revenue-sharing and other kickbacks that reward advisers for steering clients into particular investments.

This is not radical. Countries including the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Australia already ban these kinds of sales incentives for financial advisers. Other professions recognize the same principle. In medicine, kickbacks can be felonies. Lawyers can lose their licenses for paid referrals. Investors deserve the same protection.

And Galvin should enforce those rules – not with press releases, but with real investigations, real accountability and real consequences for misconduct.

Until then, investors should think twice before entrusting their life savings to financial advisers.