Scramble for signatures, sniping mark Finra board campaign

Four potential candidates for a small-firm seat on the board of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Inc. are scrambling to qualify for the upcoming Finra ballot. Small-firm challengers must gather the signatures of 125 like-sized member firms by Friday to get their names on the ballot. Finra will then certify the petitions and send ballots out at the end of the month, with the vote count concluding Aug. 3 at Finra's annual meeting. The current holder of the open small-firm seat, Ken Norensberg, a compliance consultant and chief operating officer of Tritaurian Capital Inc., is seeking re-election. Others seeking to challenge him are Alan Davidson, founder of Zeus Securities Inc. in Hauppauge, N.Y., John Moloney, chief executive of Moloney Securities Co. Inc. in Manchester, Mo., and Carrie Wisniewski, a compliance consultant and president of Bridge Capital Associates, Inc. in Lilburn, Ga. The election will be the first one conducted under a new nominating procedure that Finra announced this year. The regulator's nominating committee no longer nominates small-firm candidates, leaving it up to member firms to nominate their own picks via a petition process. The committee said at the time that it hoped to "create a less negative election environment." In recent years, petition challengers from small firms have been successful in beating out candidates picked by Finra's nominating committee. In fact, Mr. Norensberg, who won as a petition candidate last year, said the new petition procedure works better since it's seen as a disadvantage by small-firm candidates to be picked by the nominating committee. But the petition process hasn't eliminated the sniping among competing candidates; Mr. Davidson and Mr. Norensberg already have been trading barbs. Mr. Davidson claims that Mr. Norensberg unfairly gained an advantage by soliciting petitions prior to a May 3 Finra election notice. Mr. Norensberg denies that. Both men said they have more than enough signatures to get on the ballot. Mr. Moloney said he is unsure whether he will get enough signatures by Friday. Ms. Wisniewski said she needed about 10 more. She also complained that Mr. Norensberg sent emails soliciting petitions within three hours of Finra's posting of its election notice, while it took her several days to obtain the updated member-firm email list from Finra. The new petitioning procedure has caused broker-dealers to be "bombarded" with emails from the potential candidates, Ms. Wisniewski added. "It may be causing a lot of small firms to just tune out," she said. The Finra board has 22 members. Three governors come from small broker-dealers with less than 150 representatives, three from large firms and one from a midsize firm. Member firms can nominate and vote only for candidates representing their size category.