Do the SEC and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) need to tighten up anti-money-laundering (AML) and countering-the-financing-of-terrorism (CFT) requirements? You don’t need to know the lyrics to “Tighten Up,” by Houston’s Archie Bell & the Drells, to puzzle out the answer. It does. The SEC’s Division of Examinations (a.k.a. EXAMS) oversees broker-dealers and… Read More >>
Time to Ban Stock Trading by Federal Officials?
U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (Democrat of New York) and U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (Republican of Missouri) have introduced a bill that would “create stringent stock trading bans and disclosure requirements for Congress, senior executive branch officials, and their spouses and dependents.” The Ban Stock Trading for Government Officials Act prohibits “stock trading, stock ownership, and blind… Read More >>
Socium Fund Services Deploys Broadridge’s Sentry & Other News
Socium to Manage Portfolios & Ops via Sentry A private equity and private credit fund administrator, Socium Fund Services reports that it has deployed the Sentry loan portfolio management technology solution from Broadridge Financial Solutions, a post-trade systems, services, and applications provider. Socium will use the Sentry system “to more efficiently manage complex private credit… Read More >>
UBS Fined $387M for Credit Suisse’s Archegos Chapter
UBS Group is paying $387 million in fines to the U.S. Federal Reserve System and the U.K.’s Prudential Regulation Authority and finalizing proceedings with the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) — in an effort to close the Archegos Capital Management chapter in the history of Credit Suisse, now a subsidiary of its former Swiss… Read More >>
CCOs Worry Most About SEC’s Marketing Rule: Survey
The SEC’s controversial marketing rule, a comprehensive effort to regulate investment advisers’ marketing communications, remains a top concern among the chief compliance officers (CCOs) at these firms, according to the results of the 2023 Investment Management Compliance Testing (IMCT) survey. Nearly three-quarters of survey respondents, or 70.32 percent, chose advertising/marketing as the hottest compliance issue… Read More >>
DTCC & CME Push to Expand Treasuries Deal & Other News
DTCC, CME Need Regulators to Allow Cross-Margining Expansion Post-trade infrastructure system and services provider DTCC and derivatives exchanges company CME Group report that they would like to improve their cross-margining arrangement so that clearing members of CME and the Government Securities Division of DTCC’s Fixed Income Clearing Corp. (FICC) can trade and clear U.S. Treasury… Read More >>
EDX Markets Creates a New Path for Crypto Exchanges
Without a lot of fanfare, digital asset marketplace company EDX Markets, based in Jersey City, N.J., went live with a cryptocurrency platform during a crypto winter that’s beginning to thaw while regulators are rooting out alleged crypto crooks and rogues. Crucially, EDX describes itself as “the first-of-its-kind digital asset marketplace” that sidesteps providing custody support… Read More >>
Crypto-Crime ‘Down Significantly’ in 2023: Chainalysis
“Our data shows that cryptography-related crime is down significantly this year.” So says Chainalysis, the New York City-based blockchain-analytics company. Of course, the crypto-crime goal posts do tend to keep moving, from quarter to quarter and year to year, thanks in part to would-be crypto moguls like Alex Mashinsky, founder of Celsius, a now bankrupt… Read More >>
Can APIs Ease Prime Brokerage Friction?
(Prerak Sanghvi and his New York City-based employer Clear Street, which describes itself as “an independent, non-bank prime broker” are on a mission. They want to help the capital markets industry move beyond mainframe-based, legacy infrastructures and onto Clear Street’s cloud-native clearing and custody system. Getting there will require application programming interfaces (APIs), which are links… Read More >>
Merrill Lynch Pays $12M to Resolve SAR Charges
Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. and its parent company BAC North America Holding Co. (BACNAH) have settled with the SEC and FINRA over charges that the broker-dealer failed to file approximately 1,500 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) from 2009 to late 2019, resulting in penalties and fines totaling $12 million. The SAR shortcomings came… Read More >>
