Winning the award for all-out enthusiasm, an analyst from Needham & Company offered in an email to “crawl on broken glass” naked to get the deal. “Right now, my whole life is about posturing for the Toys R Us IPO,” he wrote in a subsequent message.

“Everyone really wanted to get this business,” said Susan Axelrod, Finra’s executive vice president for regulatory operations. “But instead of following the guidelines, everybody blurred the lines and did what they thought they needed to do to get it.”

None of the banks settling with Finra would comment on the settlement for this column.

The firms got into trouble by jockeying to please the owners of Toys “R” Us: a group of private equity firms that includes KKR and Bain Capital.

Toys “R” Us was a tough customer in the pre-deal negotiations. It required any firm wishing to underwrite its initial public offering to submit an investment banking pitch and company valuation that included deep involvement and support from the firm’s retailing analyst. The retailer went so far as to tell Merrill Lynch that its analyst’s view could influence what underwriting role it might receive in the deal.

If a bank was picked as an underwriter, Toys “R” Us said that “the firm, including the analyst, would be expected to stand behind the valuation provided” in the pitch, Finra found.

Such pitches were intended to protect Toys “R” Us, one of the company’s officials said, “from being ‘burned’ by an analyst’s decision to adopt a negative view” of the retailer after winning the investment banking business.

Never mind that securities regulations clearly bar this kind of activity. They say that “no research analyst may, among other things, participate in any ‘pitches’ for investment banking business to prospective investment banking clients or have other communications with companies for the purpose of soliciting investment banking business.” An analyst may communicate with a company during the I.P.O. process only to obtain information about its operations.