Series 28

It is aimed at the person designated as financial and operations principal of an introducing broker-dealer - a firm that routes customer accounts to a clearing firm rather than carrying them. If your firm clears and carries customer accounts, the financial operations role is normally paired with a different, broader qualification. Confirm the specific requirement for your firm's business model with FINRA and your compliance team.

The blueprint is split evenly across five areas: financial reporting; net capital; customer protection, reserve and segregation; recordkeeping and internal controls; and operations, supervision and financial responsibility. No single area dominates, so a candidate who skips the reserve computation or the recordkeeping rules to spend everything on net capital is exposed on roughly four-fifths of the exam.

The exam is multiple choice. Expect a mix of definitional items, computational items built on net capital and reserve formulas, and scenario questions that ask what the FINOP must do, file, or escalate in a given situation. Because the computations dominate the difficulty, practice them with a scratch pad and a time limit rather than reading worked examples.

Those administrative values are not published in the source material used here, and they are revised periodically, so this page does not state them. Get the current appointment length, item count, and passing standard directly from FINRA's qualification examination pages before you book a seat, and treat any number from a third-party study guide as unverified.

FINRA sets retake rules and any waiting period, and those terms are not reproduced here because they were not confirmed against current FINRA material. Check FINRA's own exam pages for the current retake policy and any fee that applies to a subsequent attempt, and build your study plan so that a retake is a fallback rather than part of the plan.

A workable sequence is recordkeeping and internal controls first, then financial reporting, then net capital, then customer protection and reserve, then operations and supervision. Each stage supplies inputs the next one needs: the books and records feed the financial statements, the statements feed net capital, and net capital interacts with the reserve computation. Finish with supervision and financial responsibility as synthesis.

Three recurring failure modes: memorizing net capital definitions without being able to run the computation under time pressure; confusing the customer protection reserve computation with the segregation of customer securities; and missing the filing, notice, and escalation obligations that attach to a deficiency. The scenario questions reward candidates who know not just the number but who must be told and when.

FINRA publishes its rulebook, interpretive guidance, notices, frequently asked questions, and key-topic pages through the Rules & Guidance section of its site, and a compliance calendar and report center among its compliance tools. Those are the primary sources; a study guide is a map to them, not a substitute for the text of the rules themselves.

It is not. FINRA is a not-for-profit self-regulatory organization that, among other functions, administers qualification exams and publishes rules and guidance for member firms. This page is independent study material written for candidates and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by FINRA, and it is not an official study aid.