Series 24: 2.1.7. Supervising Third-Party Vendors

2.1.7.  Supervising Third-Party Vendors

FINRA holds firms just as responsible for supervising the behavior of third-party vendors as the firm's own associated persons. This means that if a firm outsources certain business functions, they are required to make sure that the third party complies with FINRA rules. FINRA gives these examples of areas that may be outsourced to a third-party vendor: “accounting/finance (payroll, expense account reporting, etc.), legal and compliance, information technology (IT), operations functions (e.g., statement production, disaster recovery services, etc.) and administration functions (e.g., human resources, internal audits, etc.).”