SAN ANTONIO, Texas – Unintended consequences.

That’s what’s keeping broker-dealers awake at night as they consider the implications of new regulations that would require them to live up to the higher fiduciary standards under consideration by the Department of Labor.

“It’s actually not about us. We will adopt. We will find a way to make it work. We move on. But it’s what the impact might be on the client,” Patrick Rieck, who heads the corporate retirement business at Morgan Stanley, said Wednesday.

The concern, he said, is that the regulations will make it more difficult to deliver retirement services, resulting in a “detrimental impact on coverage.”

It was a sentiment echoed by all of Rieck’s co-panelists at a Center for Due Diligence conference session focusing not just on fiduciary standards, but on regulatory scrutiny of IRA rollovers, proposed mandates to provide participants with better retirement income projections and efforts by states across the country to establish new retirement plans for private-sector employees.

Also read: DOL fiduciary rule in 2016?