This is a transcript of the GRIP Podcast Valerie Mirko on FINRA, due process, and her testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, featuring a conversation between GRIP’s Vlada Gurvich and Valerie Mirko, partner and practice leader for Securities Regulation and Litigation at Armstrong Teasdale.
[INTRO]
Vlada Gurvich: Greetings everyone and welcome to the Global Relay Intelligence and Practice, or GRIP, podcast. I am Vlada Gurvich, talking to you from New York City. GRIP is a service that features a daily website with articles on a variety of compliance and regulatory topics, plus podcasts and other deep dives into compliance trends and best practices. You can find the service at grip.globalrelay.com and we hope you’ll connect with GRIP on LinkedIn.
I’m pleased to announce that today’s podcast session features Valerie Mirko, who is a partner and practice leader for Securities Regulation and Litigation at Armstrong Teasdale. To start us off, Valerie, could you please tell us more about your background and your current areas of focus?
Valerie Mirko: Absolutely, Vlada, and thank you so much for having me on today’s episode. I’m really looking forward to our conversation. As you mentioned, I’m a partner and practice leader at Armstrong Teasdale. I’ve been at the firm for just over three years. Before that, I was a partner in Baker McKenzie’s Litigation and Government Enforcement practice. My practice essentially has been the same from Baker through my time at Armstrong Teasdale. I represent broker dealers, investment advisers, and public companies subject to SEC investigations and other regulatory initiatives.
For example, I represent investment advisers during SEC exams, particularly if they’re high-risk exams. In addition to my SEC defense practice, I also represent broker dealers subject to either FINRA investigations or inquiries by state regulators. The reality of my practice is I don’t just work on enforcement investigations. I also work on internal investigations, investment adviser exams, and a range of risk-related counseling when it comes to regulatory matters.
I do have regulatory colleagues who assist with, for example, SEC rule implementation with our clients, but I’m often brought in for the risk component. That’s something I really enjoy. I really enjoy defending enforcement investigations, but I also really enjoy providing input towards building a regulatory risk program or compliance program. I also find internal investigations fascinating, even when the SEC or another regulator is not involved.
Vlada Gurvich: Well, thank you for sharing this. I think I might guess that one of the reasons why you’re interested in so many different areas is also because you have just a unique blend of experience. You have this extraordinary experience working with securities regulators and in-house at two industry firms, as well as in private practice. How does this broad experience inform your practice today?
Valerie Mirko: You’re exactly right, Vlada. Even though my day-to-day is enforcement investigations and internal investigations, I always appreciate providing input on other types of engagements with clients because I was in-house with two different broker dealers who were also dual registrant as investment advisers. Also, I think I do have a unique point of view on federal and state regulators because I was the general counsel at NASA for several years. I think if we’re going to say it in one word in terms of how does the breadth of my experience inform my practice today, I’m both very pragmatic, I know how to put myself in the shoes of our clients because at points I have been a client, but I’m also very attuned to how regulators think.
I think that’s very important for people who do what we do to really be able to put yourself not just in the shoes of your client, but also in the shoes of the regulator who’s across the table and understand what are their concerns. How do those concerns evolve depending on the current regulatory climate, the current financial climate, and also the federal state interplay?
The bulk of my practice is representing clients, including public companies, not just broker dealers and investment advisers, who are subject to some kind of SEC scrutiny. But the SEC is not the only securities regulator in the US. We have a multi-regulatory system. More importantly, we have a federal state system as well as SROs. So, I think it’s important to always really think, “Who’s the regulator across the table from me? Where do they fit into the ecosystem? And then what does that mean for the representation of my client?”
Vlada Gurvich: That sounds incredible, surely. And I’m just so excited to have you with us today. And I think also this experience allows you to predict things and write about things in a very unique way within the financial services industry, like how they decide to regulate matters. So, I would like to ask my next question about the things that you’ve written so far.
So, the financial services regulatory regime is consistently evolving to keep up with new technology products and services. And a year ago, you outlined the expected key priorities under SEC Chair Paul Atkins. So just to start us off, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about them?
Valerie Mirko: Sure, absolutely. And prediction is something we all have to do for those of us who are defense counsel, and frankly, also for our in-house colleagues. And we do like to look back six months and a year later and see if we were right. And it’s always nice when we are.
So, my predictions, or rather my expectations of what we would see under Chair Atkins, I really saw, let’s remember we’re recording this in March of 2026 – I think this is coming out in April – so, it will be right about a year when our listeners are hearing this. At that point, It’ll be right about a year that Chair Atkins has been in his current tenure at the SEC. I think something that was really unique a year ago when we were looking at what an Atkins SEC would look like is that he had served as an SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008. And notably, current commissioners, Peirce, Uyeda, had served as his counsels at various times earlier in his tenure at the SEC when he was a commissioner. So, we really could do a lot more of reading the tea leaves in a more sort of unified way than is always the case.
So that was a really exciting time for us to really be able to look ahead. And I really expected the following developments, particularly first and foremost cryptocurrency and digital assets. That surprises no one that that was a really important issue for Chair Atkins to incorporate in his tenure. And I’ll note the commission did not wait for Chair Atkins to be nominated or confirmed or begin his tenure because as soon as Chair Gensler left, then-acting-chair Mark Uyeda worked quickly towards instilling innovation and beginning the very important process of clarifying a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency and digital assets.
Crypto Task Force was launched, Commissioner Peirce has been leading it. And it’s interesting to talk about this now because there’s been all these new crypto developments with the SEC that have been very positive in terms of normalizing the use of digital assets. Several matters have been and litigations have been withdrawn against stakeholders and participants in the crypto and digital assets industry. That was something we were all hoping for a year ago. And that’s something we highlighted a year ago as well, that this is a key priority for Chair Atkins. He had emphasized the need for clear, effective, and this part is important, non-political regulation, particularly regarding digital assets, that he was looking for a rational, coherent and principled approach. And that’s what we’ve seen since. It’s been very incremental. I think it’s been slower than some of us would have wanted, but I think it’s been very thoughtful.
We can walk through the details and nuances of the various staff interpretations that have come out, the results of the crypto roundtables, the most current interpretation that came out just a few days ago. But I think the thread that ties all of this is this very incremental, careful, and thoughtful approach to paving a path for crypto and digital assets to be just another part of the US economy. I mean, that was really, you know, when I was at Baker, we had a lot of conversations with clients about is the US the right market. And I still was having these conversations when I came to Armstrong Teasdale, and I think it’s important that now it is.
The other thing we’re seeing, though, is a renewed interest in pushing back on fraud, a renewed interest in prosecuting fraud, whether it’s crypto-related, whether it’s AI-related, or whether it’s just, frankly, fraud. And that’s another thing I expected about a year ago, which was just a renewed enforcement focus on back to basics. What is true fraud? It’s not about sort of a specific industry or specific subset of the industry, but sort of what are trends in fraud? How can the SEC be even more nimble in going after that fraud? And I think the important part, and this is key, is their investor harm? And can that be remediated? There’s been a renewed focus on that. And, you know, editorializing that is the SEC’s role. That is what is part of its mission. So, we had expected that a year ago, but it’s nice to see that that has happened. The “back to basics” regarding enforcement.
The other thing that I had highlighted a year ago is regarding public companies. The most significant development relating to SEC oversight of public companies right about the time that Chair Atkins began his tenure was the commission’s vote to cease defending the public company climate disclosure rules. And then Acting Chair Uyeda noted that without a congressional mandate, the SEC was not in the business of facilitating the disclosure of information, not clearly, and I think that’s the key word, clearly related to financial returns.
A year ago, I really expected a pro-capital formation stance to continue with disclosures tailored to size and resources of public companies. I think a lot of people think of public companies as large companies. That’s not always the case. And I think we, you know, our expectations came… have held up. A year later, we’re expecting to see changes to Reg S-K soon. It’s been a little slower than expected, but congressional action is needed in some areas for capital formation.
At this point, the staff at the chair’s direction is really looking at rules that have a chilling effect on companies wanting to go public. Chair Atkins has frequently noted in the last year that there are 4,700 public companies right now, as opposed to 7,800 when he left the agency in 2008. I’m not surprised that this is an issue he’s focused on because when chair Clayton was SEC chair during the first Trump SEC, we saw a lot of the same dialogue and discourse. So, you know, I’m not saying that Chair Atkins is identical to Chair Clayton. They have different points of views and so forth. But I think there are common aspects to their tenures and there is alignment.
The other two key points I wanted to emphasize before we move on is rulemaking, whether it’s for broker dealers, investment advisers, public companies, it’s decelerated. I don’t think that’s solely has to do with prioritization or anything like that. I think it’s just a reality of there was a government shutdown for 43 days in the fall. Rulemaking is, as it should be, deliberate, collaborative, requires deep thinking and, you know, for 43 days that did not occur. So, there’s been that deceleration. And we had predicted a continued recalibration of SEC resources and staffing. I do appreciate that Chair Atkins has been very thoughtful in addressing perceptions of SEC brain drain and the need to staff certain important areas. We’re seeing job postings at the SEC for senior level roles where folks left about a year ago, whether it was a result of DOGE or not. That doesn’t matter. The point is there’s a clear emphasis by chair Atkins and this current SEC to make sure this brain drain does not occur and that the agency is properly staffed.
Vlada Gurvich: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective. And I really enjoyed listening to how you outlined those priorities a year ago and how they evolved right now. Before we move on, if I may ask a follow up question, were there any shifts that you did not expect a year ago or was it more or less predictable?
Valerie Mirko: I’m going to say it was fairly predictable other than I did not expect a 43-day government shutdown. I expected something of a shutdown, but this was the longest shutdown in history. The timing of it was complex because it was right at the beginning of the SEC’s fiscal year. There’s a lot of reports and just output that the SEC makes around the end of September and sometime in October. So, I would say the 43-day shutdown, the length of it I did not expect. Once it got past 20 days though, I knew it would decelerate a lot of priorities, just sort of the reality of not having people quote “in the building” for 43 days.
That said, obviously the bread and butter of my practice is enforcement and Chair Atkins had a seminal Wells process speech in October during the shutdown. And at that point it was becoming clear to us, to those of us on the defense bar, that a good 10 to 20% of the building was still working in some capacity.
So, it was a shutdown, but it was still the key things that needed to get done got done, particularly with moving forward policy aspects. What Chair Atkins said in his Wells, we call it the Wells speech, in October has come to bear in the revisions of the enforcement manual that came out a few weeks ago, particularly regarding the Wells process, cooperation credit, timing to submit a Wells response. These things had all become unfortunately muddied during Chair Gensler’s tenure. There were reports of Wells responses with four-day deadlines. That didn’t happen to me, but it happened to some of my colleagues in the defense bar. And that’s not due process, that’s just unfair. And I think something that Chair Atkins has done well is recalibrate that, reinsert the importance of due process within the enforcement program, meet it front and center. And that’s been a really good thing.
The other thing that I will say, at this point, it’ll be about a month since it’s happened, but we’re recording this the week that Judge Ryan has departed her position as Director of the Enforcement Division at the SEC. Listeners will guess that we’re right around mid-March for me saying this. We’ll see what happens by the time this episode comes out in April, but I think there’s been a lot of agitation around what does it mean that her tenure was so short. And what I would really emphasize for people to think about though is the recalibration of the SEC’s enforcement program began in January of 2025 when Chair Gensler left. And it began under Acting Chair Uyeda. It continued with Chair Atkins coming into the role in April. And during that whole time, Sam Waldon was Acting Director of the Division of Enforcement. And as of mid-March of 2026, he’s again the Acting Director of the Division of Enforcement.
While Judge Ryan’s tenure as Enforcement Director was relatively short, and I’m not discounting that, I think we need to look at her tenure in the context of a far longer trajectory, which began in January of 2025. And as of March, and I’m sure April of 2026, will be continuing. Really, again, it’s the back to basics focus on investor harm, on due process, on recalibrating the Wells process, on giving cooperation credit, on the issue of waivers, the issue of, we don’t talk about this any more because it’s been a year plus now, but rolling back the delegation authority so that at some point there were about 30 to 50 people in the Enforcement Division that could sign a subpoena, and that’s too many. And that’s an example of delegation going too far. Rolling that back, that all occurred before Judge Ryan was Director of the Division, and it will continue.
So, I’m hoping that by the time this episode comes out, we’ll have a new Division Director, but whomever it is, the agenda for the Enforcement Division, so to speak, has been set, and it’s a back to basics agenda.
Vlada Gurvich: Speaking about recalibration, recently you were invited to testify in front of the US House of Representatives Financial Services Committee during a hearing examining SEC oversight of FINRA and the MSRB. So, could you tell us a bit more about this experience?
Valerie Mirko: So, I’m going to start by telling you that that does not usually happen for law firm partners who do enforcement defense work, even those of us who have a broader practice and also do risk advising, regulatory advising, and so forth. So, I don’t want any of our listeners to think that this happens every day of my career, but it was really exciting. I really enjoyed working on it. We’re very fortunate to have a government relations affiliate, ATGS, that we have fantastic government relations professionals who helped me prep for testimony because the reality is while I had a lot of ideas on how the SEC is overseeing FINRA, and I had a very strong point of view. What was amazing was working with government relations professionals, including Devon Goodall, on turning those very technical legal concepts into something that would be consumable by both House of Representatives lawmakers as well as their staff.
And I think that’s really where the magic needs to be for congressional testimony. I have watched a lot of congressional testimony about the SEC and FINRA over the years, more about the SEC. I think this was only the second or third hearing that was specifically about FINRA in my 20-year career. But I’ve watched a lot of congressional testimony. I’ve watched many law school professors testify. And I really appreciated that the Capital Markets Subcommittee was interested in having a practitioner there as opposed to solely law school professors and CEOs of SROs and so forth. So, it was a great experience.
And what I really appreciated about it is being able to take my very strong point of view as a practitioner and seeing how I can actually clarify certain things. Because the reality is the delegation of authority from Congress to the SEC is already a very complex topic. And then to add that extra layer of where do SROs fit in, because let’s remember, Congress delegates authority to the SEC. The SEC delegates authority to SROs. So very technically, you can’t really have Congress supervising SROs the way you can have Congress supervise the SEC. How do you make that workable? Because more importantly, FINRA is a key component of how the broker-dealer industry is so healthy and so vibrant in the US capital markets.
So being able to thread the needle between all of these concepts, bring my lived experience as a defense practitioner and as somebody who for eight years worked very closely with state regulators as well as federal regulators and did a lot of regulatory coordination, bringing that all together was very gratifying. And I really, really appreciated the opportunity.
Vlada Gurvich: Thank you so much for sharing this with us. I think it will also be a unique opportunity for our listeners to hear about this process in more detail. And now I would like to talk a little bit more about your testimony. So, in your testimony, you’re focused on strengthening SEC oversight of FINRA as the key solution. So, if you had to pick one particular change that would make the biggest difference right now, what would it be and why?
Valerie Mirko: So that really goes to a couple of aspects of my testimony. First, how do we improve the SEC’s oversight of SRO governance? How do we improve the board oversight of SRO governance as well? And then, and this is a really sort of, you know, dear-to-my-heart issue, how do we address fairness and due process concerns of SROs?
A couple of years ago, I co-authored a white paper on due process and fairness concerns regarding the SEC’s then enforcement program. It was really to push back at regulation by enforcement of the SEC. I co-authored this white paper with Peter Chan, who’s a partner at Baker McKenzie, and who also testified about a month before me in front of the same subcommittee. FINRA is, you know, we’ve not heard a lot, and I’ve not experienced a lot of, quote, regulation by enforcement from FINRA, but FINRA, because of its SRO status, has its own fairness and due process concerns. So, you know, I know you asked me what is the one thing that could change, and I can’t give you just one. I think the SEC’s oversight of FINRA can be recalibrated, and I provided certain recommendations about that within my testimony.
For example, requiring the SEC chair or delegated commissioner to serve as a non-voting member of SRO boards, and that could be FINRA, the MSRB, and so forth. I also recommended uniform SRO board composition and management requirements, and I do think these changes could go a long way, sort of on a more holistic level. But the things I really care about are things like fairness and due process concerns of SROs, and specifically, one of the recommendations I had is, and this is very inside baseball, so tell me if I’m going too far down any kind of rabbit hole, but there is not currently the level of SEC review regarding FINRA bars or expulsion decisions that I think there should be. And, you know, we can spend hours getting into the nuances of that, but really, I think the most important takeaway is, while there has been recalibration by FINRA regarding its bars and expulsion rules, including some amount of SEC review for firms, we have not yet seen that improvement regarding individuals.
So, you know, very generally in the testimony I talk about requiring the SEC’s review of bars and expulsions because individuals should be receiving the benefit of this additional and necessary layer of government oversight. You know, we’ve seen that for firms. We have not yet seen it for individuals, and there’s some further nuances and subtleties, which, you know, maybe we can do a part two of this podcast episode. But at the end of the day, to me, it’s about better safeguarding Fifth Amendment rights of those in the industry.
You know, that said, I appreciate there’s sometimes emergency situations where, you know, if an SEC review takes a long time, FINRA would like to act more quickly. So as part, and this is recommendation for three, for anybody who’d like to look at the written testimony, you know, I did add an additional layer of investor protection recourse in the event of egregious misconduct, where there could be a TRO, there could be a preliminary injunction so that through an appointed Article 3 judge, FINRA might be able to accelerate the process.
But I think this is the important part. FINRA as an SRO, to me, should either have additional SEC oversight on this issue or should have to go through a court. We can debate the nuances of process all day long, but those do need to be part of it.
Some of the questions that came up in the hearing were also about, well, should there be statutes of limitations for FINRA? There was an academic who testified saying, well, you know, FINRA’s main recourse is expulsion from the industry. It’s not the removal of live property and so forth. But the reality is being expulsed from the industry is a removal of property in its own way, perhaps not as strictly as he might … as this professor was looking at it. But I think due process is just so important. And having further SEC review and sort of being part of this FINRA process, I think that needs to be a reform.
Vlada Gurvich: Well, I definitely agree with you that when I was preparing for this podcast, it was extremely difficult to choose what we should talk about because in your written testimony, you provide 10 wonderful recommendations and it was just so difficult to choose what we should focus on today. But before we move on, please, could you provide a quick overview of some of the other recommendations that you made?
Valerie Mirko: Sure. And another one I do want to highlight because while I myself do not litigate arbitrations, I’m very much sort of enforcement defense, exams, and internal investigations, there needs to be some amount of correcting the weaknesses in FINRA’s arbitration process. And I do get into that pretty extensively in my written testimony. SIFMA also submitted a letter to the subcommittee within the context of the hearing and a big part of their letter was about arbitration reform.
But to answer your question, yes, I did have 10 recommendations. They were organized in five categories. We’ve talked about a couple of them. One is improving SEC and board oversight of SRO governance. One is addressing fairness and due process concerns of SROs. The other three recommendations were correcting the weaknesses in FINRA’s arbitration process as well as increasing fairness and efficiencies in the rulemaking process. And then finally, finding ways to eliminate SRO inefficiencies and duplications, which is just a reality of having multiple regulators.
But before we move on from the testimony, something that I thought was really interesting about the hearing was the discussion of, well, you know, is FINRA subject to the APA? A couple of times during the hearing that came up and the reality is FINRA’s rulemaking process is two parts. There’s the FINRA notice to members process or FINRA regulatory notice process component where they collect comments and input from stakeholders in the industry and from practitioners and academics. And then there’s a second layer of this process where they submit the rulemaking proposal to the SEC. And that part is subject to the APA. So that’s an interesting nuance, but also a really good example of how do you manage delegated authority? And in this case, I think for rulemaking, it is managed through having that two-part rulemaking process.
It sounds layered. It sounds to some perhaps like it could be more efficient, but I do think it is important to note that there already is an APA component. Can it be improved? Of course, which is why one of my recommendations was to review delegated authority for rule approval as well as the process for rule approval. So, what’s really important to me to highlight is there is already a process that takes into account this. It just could be, you know, it could be improved.
One of the other recommendations that is related to rulemaking in my testimony is requiring a review of outdated regulatory notices and rules, as well as a cost benefit analysis framework. And that’s what I call a perennial issue. And I do think FINRA has done a very good job at reviewing its rules, but it could, there could still be a better process. And that was really, you know, if I had to summarize the testimony in one sentence, it’s FINRA’s role as an SRO is important, and there can always be things to improve, you know, in these five categories that I outlined.
Vlada Gurvich: Thank you so much for sharing that with us. And now I would like to talk a little bit more about some of the topics that were discussed during the hearing. And you were asked about those topics as well, but you had basically no time to respond to those questions. So now I would like to hear a little bit more about those discussions, if I may. My first question would be looking at bigger industry themes. When you were asked about pump-and-dump schemes, you reframed the issue as a broader, almost timeless challenge of fighting fraud, but noted that AI is now acting as an accelerant in surveillance. Do you see AI as fundamentally changing the balance between regulators and bad actors? Or is it simply raising the stakes on both sides?
Valerie Mirko: I think in the short term, there is an element of raising the stakes. The good guys, this is very much a white hat, black hat issue, right? And wearing the white hat here is not just the regulators, but also the industry. Nobody in the industry is interested in AI fraud, and they’re all use, you know, industry stakeholders are using AI tools to… to surveil for fraud, at least as quickly, if not more quickly than regulators.
And then obviously the black hat is the bad actors. I think in the short term, everybody has access to this technology in some way or another. So, in the short term, it might be raising the stakes on both sides. I think there is an opportunity here to fundamentally change the balance between, you know, the good actors and the bad actors, because surveillance before AI was strong, surveillance with AI is transformational in terms of the speed, you know, it’s pattern recognition, not just in seconds anymore, but in nanoseconds. So, I’m hoping we see the balance being recalibrated against fraud. I really, I really think there’s an opportunity here, but only time will tell.
Vlada Gurvich: I definitely share your approach on that matter. And another thing that I would like to ask you about is something that you’ve already mentioned today during our conversation, which is regulation of digital assets and cryptocurrencies. So, another major policy issue right now is crypto oversight. You’ve pointed to the need for clear legislation like the CLARITY Act, but also during the hearing you acknowledged how complex it is to regulate digital assets in the meantime. So, do you think regulators today are trying to apply traditional concepts like materiality to something fundamentally different? Or is the real issue simply the lack of clear market structure rules?
Valerie Mirko: Now, I think that’s the real issue here. You know, the SEC can only do so much with its current authority and I think is doing a very good job at figuring that out through the crypto roundtables, through the guidance we’ve seen in recent months. But ultimately there is a remaining and real issue of the lack of clear market structure rules. There’s only so much that regulators can do without congressional action. What we’ve seen so far, however, is we’re seeing really very clear guidance from the SEC and the CFTC to define and classify digital assets, providing broker dealers with guidance on custody and really a healthy public message of regulatory harmonization between the two agencies.
And of course there was the recent MOU announced as well. But the reality is that we have the laws that exist and industry members need to make sure that they’re operating in accordance with the rules. The approach of guidance gives firms to go ahead to pursue innovative products or services that’s good, as opposed to them opting out of offering them because that’s what was happening in recent years to some extent. But ultimately we do need the CLARITY Act to become law because that is sort of the remaining component that all of us are waiting for.
Vlada Gurvich: I hope that this will be the case very, very soon. My final question for today, looking ahead, what are you watching most closely right now in terms of regulatory trends? And after participating in that hearing, what do you realistically expect to come out of it in terms of actual change?
Valerie Mirko: So, a couple things, you know, with the bread and butter of my practice being enforcement, I’m obviously very interested to see what happens with Judge Ryan’s replacement. So maybe by the time this episode comes out, that will have clarified. And that is a regulatory trend for me. I firmly believe that the SEC’s current enforcement program is, you know, we’ve talked about the agenda and the back-to-basics component, but, you know, personnel is still policy and I want to see who takes the role. So, I am watching that very closely.
I’m also watching what happens with digital assets and AI. I do work with AI companies and stakeholders and I do some crypto work. But at the end of the day, you know, we still have the traditional part of the industry. We still have broker dealers and investment advisers and mutual funds. And all of their work is transformed by what’s happening with digital assets. And of course, the fact that there is demand for those. So, I am continuing to watch that very closely.
And then finally, you know, a large part of my practice has consisted of perennial issues, you know, investment adviser conflicts of interest, investment advisor share class, the share class initiative, how it applied to investment advisers and broker dealers, like all of the, you know, whistleblower cases for public companies. Those things have existed for years and they will continue. And I do watch developments there because those things are all continuing. They’re just maybe not as the volume is a little bit smaller right now, but they are, those issues are continuing.
And I hope it’s okay. I’m a guest on your podcast and I’m about to talk about my podcast, but I did, I do have a monthly podcast with a co-host William Nelson, who is the director of policy as well as associate general counsel at the investment advisor association. He’s also a law school professor. And you know, we do talk about exactly those issues every month. So, there will be a continuation in that sense. We talked about the February hearing, about the SEC and due process. We talked about the hearing I testified at, that episode came out on March 18th and the SEC’s role in overseeing FINRA specifically and SROs more generally. So, you know, I, I talk about this at least once a month in a public setting. So, I do have to watch these issues very closely.
Vlada Gurvich: Well, thank you so much for being with us today. And I enjoyed this conversation so much. And I really hope that you will come back to be with our listeners as well. So, thank you so much for coming.
Valerie Mirko: Thank you so much for having me.
Vlada Gurvich: And I also want to thank our listeners for tuning in. Please explore our articles and other podcasts at grip.globalrelay.com. And please tell your colleagues about us. Have a great day.