North American Securities Administrators Association

• 1. Introduction

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  The North American Securities Administrators Association was born in Kansas in 1919, at a time when ordinary investors had almost no protection against fraudulent schemes. A century later, it remains the oldest international investor protection organization in the world. How did a collection of state-level officials become the frontline defense for everyday people navigating stocks, bonds, and investment advice? And what does it mean that three of the licensing exams every securities agent in America must pass were written by this association? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Network Across Borders

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  Sixty-seven administrators make up NASAA's membership. They come from all fifty states, the District of Columbia, U.S. territories, the provinces of Canada, and Mexico. That breadth makes NASAA something unusual: a genuinely cross-border regulatory body that operates without being a single government agency. Each member carries authority within their own jurisdiction, yet they pool their reach through the association. Multi-state enforcement actions are one direct product of that pooling. When a fraud operation crosses state lines, individual states acting alone face serious jurisdictional limits; NASAA's coordinated structure lets members pursue cases together. Information sharing runs alongside enforcement, so patterns spotted in one state can alert regulators in another before a fraud spreads. Joseph Borg of Alabama served as NASAA president three times, in 2002, 2007, and 2018, which gives a sense of how deeply individual members can become embedded in the organization's ongoing work.

• 3. Protecting the Grassroots Investor

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  NASAA's stated mission focuses on consumers who purchase securities or investment advice, a deliberately broad mandate. Its jurisdiction reaches a wide variety of issuers and intermediaries who offer and sell securities to the public. That includes the small brokerage firm operating out of a strip mall as much as larger financial players. Frequent public warnings about investment fraud are one of the most visible outputs of that mission. NASAA has also drawn attention to the tax advantages of college savings plans, signaling that its protective focus extends to long-term personal finance decisions, not just outright scams. Its involvement in naked short selling litigation aimed at the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation represents a more aggressive posture, taking aim at structural market practices rather than individual bad actors. The association also coordinates training programs and education seminars for staff at state, district, provincial, and territorial securities agencies, building institutional capacity across the whole network.

• 4. The Three Licensing Exams

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  NASAA writes three exams that every securities professional must reckon with at the state level. The Series 63, formally called the Uniform Securities Agent State Law Exam, is required for agents who want to transact business in a given state. The Series 65, the Uniform Investment Adviser Law Exam, governs those who provide investment advice for compensation. The Series 66, the Uniform Combined State Law Exam, merges the territory covered by the 63 and 65. All three exams are administered by FINRA, even though NASAA authors them. None of the three require sponsorship from a firm, which means an individual can sit for the exams independently. The Series 66 carries one condition the others do not: it requires the Series 7 as a co-requisite, meaning candidates must hold or be testing simultaneously for that FINRA-administered exam before the Series 66 counts.

• 5. Capital Formation and Regulation A

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  Smaller companies seeking to raise money from the public face a thicket of federal registration requirements. Regulation A of the Securities Act of 1933 provides an exemption that allows them to raise capital with a lighter compliance burden. NASAA runs a coordinated review process for companies using that exemption. Rather than each state running its own review independently, NASAA centralizes the effort, which reduces duplication for the companies seeking capital and for the states doing the reviewing. That coordination role reflects a recurring theme in how NASAA operates: it functions as a clearinghouse that makes the distributed network of state regulators work more efficiently than they could alone. Denise Voigt Crawford of Texas served as NASAA president in both 1998 and 2010, one of several presidents who held the role in multiple non-consecutive years, suggesting the small-world character of state securities regulation across the United States.