When President Obama appointed FINRA chief Mary Schapiro as the new Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the nation was promised an overhaul of the agency and of securities regulation in general. Given the turmoil created by the financial meltdown and the Bernard Madoff mess, we are seeing those changes happen very quickly.

Indeed, we are seeing new rules and proposals, including the re-introduction of short-selling restrictions, increasing calls for registration of investment advisors and more tinkering with rules regarding the operation of public companies. At the same time, there is a renewed effort to toughen the enforcement of existing rules and regulations.

The real question for you is: How will these changes affect individual advisors?

The failures that were revealed during the Madoff investigation have resulted in the complete overhaul of the senior SEC staffers who were involved in the process. That overhaul started with the appointment of Schapiro as the Chairman of the SEC. She did an admirable job as the head of the NASD and in the consolidation of the NYSE Enforcement Division with the NASD to create FINRA.

Whatever your thoughts are of the choice, Schapiro should prove to be a benefit to the individual broker. She isn't exactly a fan of the retail broker, but she fully understands the brokerage business. One can expect that she will understand the impact of new rule proposals and enforcement initiatives and will temper the calls for more extreme changes that would ultimately harm the markets and the financial industry.

She has promised change, and in the few short months that she has been at the SEC, those changes are happening. First, she re-vamped the process for instituting formal investigations, reducing the process time from months to a couple of days. While that might not seem like much of a benefit to advisors, it is. Under the old process, it could take months for an investigation to get off the ground, causing anxiety for potential witnesses and targets of such probes.

Also, a swifter enforcement program could mean more investigations, more enforcement proceedings, and increased fines and penalties for those who have been found to violate the law. Assuming that the process is not tainted by a desire to simply bring cases, regardless of merit, to satisfy Congress and the public, even this change will provide long-term benefits to advisors, as it increases confidence in the markets in general.

At the same time, the Enforcement Division is also undergoing significant changes. It is the enforcement division that has come under increasing criticism in recent months, and one of Schapiro's first appointments was to name Robert Khuzami as the new Director of the Division of Enforcement. One criticism of the SEC has been that its senior executives are all career regulators who live in a regulatory bubble with no outside input or contact.

Khuzami's most recent position was as general counsel for an investment bank. His industry experience, coupled with his background as a former federal prosecutor who headed the securities fraud unit for the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan, should provide a fresh look at enforcement, its goals and its ramifications for the industry.

Already, we've seen an increase in audits of registered investment advisors, and with the new proposals being made to regulate hedge funds, even more advisors will be placed under regulatory scrutiny. Rounding out the enforcement revamping are proposals in Congress to increase the SEC's budget by more than $100 million to hire more investigators and attorneys.

The stated purpose of these changes is to increase investor confidence in the markets, and to ensure the integrity of the markets. Hopefully, Congress and the SEC will stay true to that goal. If so, the benefits will be seen by the investment advisory community, as well as by investors.