Investors now can expect to get more detailed information about fee-based brokerage accounts.

The Securities and Exchange Commission gave financial firms until today to ensure that information on fee-based brokerage accounts tells clients that brokers' interests may not always be the same as theirs and that firms may get additional fees from products bought by investors.

The requirement comes as regulators continue to scrutinize those products. Regulators have looked at whether firms inappropriately put inactive investors, who make few trades, into those programs when they would be better off in accounts that charge a commission for each trade.

With fee-based brokerage accounts, trades and executions are typically the main activities, and any advice provided is "solely incidental," firms say in their marketing materials. In similar fee-based advisory accounts, advice is a main component, and brokers must act in clients' best interests. Both types of account usually charge a percentage of assets being managed, regardless of the number of trades.

Many investors still have commission-based accounts. But fee-based accounts became popular in the mid-1990s as a way to align broker pay with investor returns.

At the end of the first quarter, assets in fee-based brokerage accounts reached $270.5 billion, according to Cerulli Associates, a financial-services research firm in Boston.

"I think that anything you can do to improve disclosure that doesn't give (investors) information overload and end up causing confusion is good," says Michael Udoff, an associate general counsel for the Securities Industry Association.

But investors still may be confused about how brokerage and advisory accounts differ, says Kirby Horan, a senior analyst at Cerulli Associates. "I don't understand. ... I don't know if I put my mother in front of these (disclosures), if she would understand," Horan said.

The disclosures are helpful because they may prompt investors to ask questions, says Daniel Moisand, president-elect of the Financial Planning Association in Denver. But they don't address the group's concern that greater regulation may be needed for brokerage accounts in which advice is given.