Statement of the Incoming President,
October 29, 2026
Joseph R. Wojciechowski
I am excited to get to work on behalf of PIABA and Mainstreet investors. I want to thank Michael Bixby for being a damn good leader, partner, and friend and look forward to continuing our work together. I want to thank my exceptional wife, Katie, for being with me here tonight, for tolerating this career path, never wavering in her support of me, and for being the best wife to me and the best mother three kids could have. Thank you.
I am eager to pick up the Banner for PIABA and continue to fight for Mainstreet over Wallstreet, and for retail investors over crooks. Before I get on with the next 45 or 50 minutes (also known as The Bixby), I must ask Jennifer Shaw to stand and be recognized for the exceptional leader and organizer she is. PIABA is blessed to have you and our organization is far stronger with Jennifer’s direction.
I remember my first PIABA conference like it was a few weeks ago. It was at La Costa in San Diego in 2009. I played in the golf tournament with Howard Eilen and he was talking about being long silver, and I didn’t know if he was talking about the fish joint in the Southside or supreme court justice clarence thomas. While considering my history with PIABA and practicing law, I thought about Peter Mougey’s president’s speech from back, I don’t know when, 15 years ago or so. He brought up his first PIABA memories, and how he was overwhelmed with the acronyms. NASD. NYSE, shoot, even PIABA. CDSCs, ISDA, VUL….what the hell, you need a decoder ring to figure all this stuff out. I was lucky. My career started in March 2005 with this guy Andrew Stoltmann, who had just opened his own firm. I had just graduated from paralegal school, had done an internship at a small Chicago securities firm so I had those acronyms, NASD, NYSE, on my resume. Andrew spotted it, and the rest is sort of history I guess.
Here’s where it got weird. I show up for my first day of work bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready to take on the world, and the office has police tape all around it. Files have police tape, Andrew’s office door handle had been removed and the door had police tape over it. I thought, Jesus, what the hell happened? Did someone kill this guy in his office? Well, turns out there was this little lawsuit between Andrew and Maddox Hargett and Caruso….I should have walked out and never come back. I had a job offer I had turned down at freaking Kirkland & Ellis. And there was his personal assistant Davy….yeesh. In typical Andrew fashion, brimming with confidence as always, he told me it’s nothing, don’t worry about it. I made the second best decision of my life at that moment (the 1st was asking Kate to marry me), to stick it out with Stoltmann.
Almost 22 years later here we are. There isn’t enough time in any day to tell even 10% of the stories. But there’s likely a book in there somewhere, who knows maybe I’ll pull a Dale Ledbetter and hand out boxes of them at a PIABA conference one day….
Andrew Stoltmann is not just one of the handful of true titans in securities arbitration and representing investors. He’s not just an eccentric personality with a growing pompadour despite gravity’s usual effects on the aging. He’s not just a wealthy, bachelor ladies. He’s an amazing teacher, a mentor, a brother in arms. And a friend. I’m not here if it wasn’t for Andrew.
Folks, there is an old curse “may you live in interesting times.” Investors have never been under attack from all sides like they are today. FINRA, SEC, and SIFMA have adopted the Trump strategy: flood the zone and gaslight. Dump so much out there that it’s almost impossible to know what to respond to and sometimes even where to start. And at the same time, when everyone knows which way is down, look everyone straight in the eye and say, no, up is down.
It’s been a hard-fought two years since Trump 2.0 took over, and investors have taken some lumps. Third party frauds are increasing exponentially year over year. FINRA and the SEC have dramatically reduced the supervision requirements of brokerage firms over outside business activities of brokers. There is an ongoing onslaught of attacks against investors in the FINRA arbitration process. RIA Arbitration is still pricing Mainstreet out of justice and is just as out of control as it was in 2022 when we all thought the SEC was paying attention to the problem. We are literally facing turning back the clock on 30 years of work and progress this organization fought for. All of it is at serious risk.
As the onslaught against retail investors continues, the SEC is intent on making it as easy as possible for advisors to sell alternative investments to everyone, everywhere; even in 401(k)s and pension plans. They unlock this Pandora’s box and write in safe harbors to make it more difficult for investors to sue these advisors when these private investments go bust. The SEC, and the Republican Congress, have spent the last two years trying to rewrite the accredited investor standard so that under the right circumstances, almost anyone with a financial advisor making recommendations, automatically qualifies as accredited. They remove the guardrails, but the Cliff remains.
But most disappointing of all, has been FINRA. Facing political pressure from Project 2025, it is in survival mode, and it has run into the waiting embrace of SIFMA.
There is a stark reality that I fear too many of us forgot. FINRA is a trade association. Nothing more. All of the platitudes over the last ten or fifteen years from FINRA about being genuinely concerned about Main Street, investor rights and investor protection were politics all along. Any bend by FINRA towards the arc of investor protection has never been about its better angels. It has always been about survival and self-interest. It has always been about maintaining itself, those multi-million dollar salaries for all of those C-Suite executives who appear to answer to no one, and about keeping themselves relevant in a rapidly changing investment landscape. After the financial crisis destroyed trillions in retiree wealth, devastating the livelihoods of Americans, veterans, and seniors, FINRA finally eliminated the mandatory Industry Arbitrator and amended the motions to dismiss rules, and eventually pushed through some modest adjustments to the Arbitrator qualifications so that Arbitration Panels looked a little more like the investors who are forced to bring their cases to them. None of these changes came out of the goodness of FINRA’s heart or because it really believed in the convictions its actions represented. PIABA dragged them there. For decades.
And now FINRA wants to drag us right back. Look no further than FINRA Regulatory Notice 26-06, which laid out in a plain 75-page notice all of the ways SIFMA wants to change FINRA arbitration to help Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and LPL. FINRA hides the reality behind its slogan, FINRA Forward, which, for all intents and purposes, should read FINRA Backward. How does it help investors to allow brokerage firms broader access to motions to dismiss in arbitration? How does it help investors to limit rights they have under state law in FINRA arbitration? How does it help investors to reduce supervision requirements? It doesn’t. But this FINRA and this SEC don’t care.
Today, despite its members welching on arbitration awards for generations now, FINRA has refunded a total of $150 million to its members in the last two years. Who knew FINRA has that kind of scratch just sitting around to be refunded? Shoot, our members still haven’t collected on awards against the Wolf of Wall Street himself and Stratton Oakmont, but FINRA can give back $150mm to its members, while another $40 million in FINRA awards go unpaid this year? It’s not right. And as Scott Shewan said in his speech at my first PIABA conference, PIABA stands for making it right.
PIABA has spent the last two years defending and counter-attacking the non-stop attacks on our clients and investor rights. Candidly we have not won every battle, but we brought the fight. Despite an exceptional collective effort to prevent FINRA Regulatory Notice 25-05 from becoming official, the SEC approved it, and it will dramatically change how broker-dealers supervise their own advisors’ outside businesses and it will increase fraud and increase the likelihood that investors, including seniors, retirees, and veterans lose their life savings to Ponzi schemes and scams. This SEC and this version of FINRA approached the first two years of Trump 2.0 like a once in a generation opportunity to revert back to Wall Street’s best interests even when diametrically opposed to what’s best for Main Street. SIFMA is getting everything it pays for. It is outrageous, it is frustrating, and it can be defeating.
But PIABA has otherwise held the line. Underfunded a million to one, undermanned at least 500 to one, through the leadership of Michael Bixby, who invoked Thermopylae and the 300 Spartans last year, PIABA now has an ever-growing media and social media presence. We aggressively countered 26-06 which included a 120-page written opposition and counter-proposal that required the writing and help of at least 30 PIABA members. We met with the SEC several times and now have an audience with the director of the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets, as opposed to merely meeting with staff. We met with the GAO about FINRA/SEC issues. We continue to present our case and that of Main Street to Congress and the SEC on the inherent unfairness of forced arbitration in all contexts. Jennifer Shaw testified brilliantly in front of Congress on questions related to FINRA and investor protection. PIABA continues to meet with Robert Cook and Bob Colby and FINRA’s executive team, who cannot deny that PIABA continues to grow in influence and importance not because we have a lobbyist or because we fly to DC, but because we are on the right side of this debate and our message is reaching the right eyes and ears. It was Ruth Bader Ginsburg who said, “Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” Our message is not falling on deaf ears, and the winds of Washington blow in fickle ways. After all, it is election season, and as everyone in this room must know, elections have consequences for our livelihoods, practices, clients, and investors.
We have held the line, but PIABA has proved that we can also win. There is no better example of how PIABA, along with the list of like-minded allies we have forged relationships with in Washington, can indeed hold that line and even push it back than our aggressive entry into the crypto-world. When I first ran for this board in 2022, one of the areas I wanted to focus on was issues related to cryptocurrency. I believed then, as I believe now and I think the evidence supports it, cryptocurrency is the worst thing to happen to investors in generations, and the best thing to happen to crooks, possibly ever. The statistics bear that out. So the Clarity Act could not pass as written and PIABA set out on the task of doing something about it.
PIABA leadership went on the attack, holding more meetings than I can count with whatever Senate office would listen, from Chuck Schumer to James Lankford, and Kirsten Gillibrand to Tim Scott, we made known the potentially tragic effects the Clarity Act could have on consumers and investors by legitimizing an unbridled asset while stripping states of their authority to regulate. We spent two Hill days talking to any office that would listen about the horrors of third-party frauds and specifically related to cryptocurrency and the exchanges that profit from it, aid, and abet it. And guess what? The Clarity Act crashed out with one of the most consequential down votes being from a Republican senator that PIABA leadership met with just days before the vote. The right side pushed back and won.
I’ve never been a defense lawyer in my life, I’ve never been good at playing defense, and I’ve never backed down from a fight. As of today, PIABA goes back on offense.
So what does offense look like? It looks like legislation that forces a modernized and reimagined FINRA; one that takes all of that money it gives back to Wall Street and uses it to fund a recovery pool for investors who get skunked by scumbags who don’t pay awards. It looks like a FINRA that requires its members, as a prerequisite for licensure, to maintain liability insurance coverage so that when they break the rules and their brokers sell high commissioned alternative investments that bust out leaving investors holding the bag, that there is some level of responsibility. I can’t drive a car without being insured, but someone can invest a billion dollars of other people’s money without a dime of insurance coverage. It’s reckless, it’s irresponsible, and FINRA must do something about it. It looks like a FINRA that has a Board of Governors that is more public in its makeup, that is accountable to the public, and which includes investor advocates. It looks like a FINRA that doesn’t allow its members to hide behind shell companies and holding companies who are not bound to arbitrate customer claims in FINRA arbitration. It looks like a FINRA that advocates for investor choice, one where an investor can decide whether to pursue his claims in court as is his right to do so, or to file in FINRA arbitration. And wherever arbitration is forced on our clients, in the AAA, Resolute, JAMS or anywhere else, PIABA will fight for fair rules.
We may be small in number, but we have the advantage. Because ours is the right side of this fight. Our clients, people who have spent their lives saving only to be scammed or defrauded by crooks out for their own pocket…PIABA is on the right side of it. Know this: Whenever FINRA takes the side of Wall Street over Main Street, PIABA will be there. Whenever the SEC wants to put the interests of Wall Street and the crypto bros over Main Street and our clients, PIABA will ride out to meet them.
President Obama often invoked the power of the word “We.” He called it the single most powerful word in our democracy. These fights are not about me, or what I can do. They are about what WE can do. All you need for inspiration is to know the fights we have won; and to know that PIABA will continue to fight, and continue to win. I urge you. If those statistics about fraud released by the FTC concern you; donate to PIABA. If you are concerned with the new rules the SEC is passing on crypto-capital raising, join the cryptocurrency committee. If you want to have a voice in the next great debate in Washington over FINRA, Crypto-Bros, the SEC, and Main Street over Wall street, run for the board. Join the fight! With your continued support and commitment, PIABA will continue to lead the fight for fairness and for what’s right for Main Street. Thank you, God bless you, and God bless PIABA.