A Trusted Contact plays a specific role with your account. You can think of the Trusted Contract as an “emergency contact.”

What is a Trusted Contact?

When filling out a trading account application, FINRA, the regulatory body of the brokerage industry, requires broker-dealers to ask each applicant for one (per FINRA Rule 4512 & Rule 2165). What's the point of listing a Trusted Contact? Listing a Trusted Contact helps broker-dealers with mitigating the financial exploitation of seniors and other specified adults. You may list anyone you can count on as a Trusted Contact, including family, friends, co-workers, and so on.

Adding a Trusted Contact to your account is not required. To proceed with the application you can submit your own name under the Trusted Contact if you do not wish to have one. 

What role does a Trusted Contact play?

A Trusted Contact person cannot make account decisions on behalf of the account owner. Some examples of account decisions that Trusted Contacts cannot do on behalf of the account owner include order entry, money movements, changes to personal information, etc. A Trusted Contact serves as a point of contact if we suspect any compromise to the account, such as financial exploitation, and we cannot reach out to the account owner for clarification.

When listing a trusted contact, the person cannot reside in a restricted country, which our clearing firm does not support. To view a list of restricted countries, please click here.

When do we reach out to the trusted contact?

When tastytrade has a reasonable basis to believe an account is compromised or we need to confirm specific contact information or authorized parties (legal guardian, executor, trustee, or power of attorney), we may reach out to the Trusted Contact person for clarification.