“My advice would be for firms to continue with the efforts that they have started or have in many cases already brought to fruition, to continue to promote any activity that allows you to engage with clients in their best interest, to disclose such to them, the further explain potential conflicts and how those are mitigated and to best document your relationship with clients and what they can expect of you and what you can expect from them,” he explained.

Jim Burson, a senior director at Cornerstone Advisors, had similar advice for credit unions.

“If I was sitting at the top of a credit union, I would probably strategically proceed toward an advisory-based model as opposed to a transaction-based model. What that means is, I may not have to update my website and all of those types of things, but I do have to update how I think about going to market,” he said.

“Then, as needed, deal with my website or those other things. They already have advisory-based disclosures, they already have all of those things in place, it's just their current business mix tends to skew transactional. It's not like they have to do anything to shift to an advisory model other than to change the mind-set of how they want to interact with members and how they want to say they earn their income to take more of a financial planning approach,” Burson added.

Financially, some credit unions could take a short-term hit by moving to an advisory-based model, and Burson is okay with that.

“The DOL fiduciary rule basically says you have to do what's right for the member,” he said. “Why is that a bad thing? It's a bad thing for a couple of reasons for several credit unions from an income point of view, but from a strategic point of view, I'm not sure that the delay should really matter one way or the other.”

“If it gets killed, or deferred, or parts of it go away, nothing in that journey to start changing how you think about your income and how you earn income from the business is going to go away,” he said.