U.K. financial institution National Westminster Bank has been fined £264.8 million ($352.7 million) after being convicted for breaches of money laundering regulation in a criminal case led by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), a key financial services regulator. The fine follows a guilty plea filed by NatWest officials in early October via Westminster Magistrates Court… Read More >>
Wells Fargo Fined $2.25M for Document Storage Woes
Ironic, isn’t it, that just when cryptography enthusiasts are touting the capability of the blockchain to memorialize complex sequences of transactions, major units of a big bank find themselves in trouble over their own record-keeping? FINRA, the broker-dealer industry’s self-regulatory authority, charges Wells Fargo Clearing Services and Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network — two units… Read More >>
AWS Outage Halted FINRA Systems on Dec. 7
Key online systems of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) were unavailable on Tuesday, Dec. 7, because of an outage at cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) that lasted about seven hours, according to alerts from the self-regulatory organization and Amazon. AWS has become a major cloud provider for financial services firms, particularly those… Read More >>
FINRA Fines Citi for Alleged U4 Filing Woes
Citigroup Global Markets has been censured by FINRA, the financial-industry’s self-regulatory authority, and will pay a $375,000 fine for alleged failures regarding Form U4 filings for its registered representatives. A form U4 is the Uniform Application for Securities Industry Registration or Transfer. Those forms would have disclosed the Citigroup reps’ “unsatisfied tax liens and judgments,”… Read More >>
Crypto to Face New Rules in 2022: Regulators
Heavy-hitter federal regulators say new rules are coming for cryptocurrencies, the new, mostly unregulated financial sector that competes with traditional banks without offering deposit insurance, the banks’ most important protection. And cryptography has been beset by high-profile scandals that have cost some would-be crypto millionaires their entire fortunes. As well, at a time of worsening… Read More >>
Key Groups Push to Start T+1 in 2024
The goalpost for the move by U.S. equities markets from T+2 to the shorter T+1 settlement cycle has shifted from 2023 to the first half of 2024 after an outreach to the industry revealed that more time was needed to revamp and test systems, workflows, and operations to facilitate this fundamental change to securities transaction processing…. Read More >>
CloudMargin & Margin Tonic to Launch AANA Service
Collaboration to Target Ongoing UMR Calculations CloudMargin, a collateral and margin management vendor, and Margin Tonic, a service provider for collateral and post-trade operations, are working together to launch “a global Average Aggregated Notional Amount (AANA) calculation service” that trading firms can use to navigate the phases of the Uncleared Margin Rules (UMR) regulatory reforms…. Read More >>
Yellen & Others Want Congress to Regulate Stablecoins
A Biden Working Group Says Stablecoins Are Risky Stablecoins lack good oversight, making them risky for users and financial markets, says Janet L. Yellen, secretary of the U.S. Treasury, in a prepared statement. Yellen’s comments follow the release of a report from the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG), which is recommending that Congress… Read More >>
Did a Deutsche Bank Whistleblower Get Nearly $200M?
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has just announced a record-setting whistleblower award of nearly $200 million but it was quickly followed by a report in The Wall Street Journal that identified the tipster as someone from Deutsche Bank. The CFTC protects all whistleblowers via confidentiality. In a press release dated Oct. 21, CFTC officials acknowledged… Read More >>
SEC Updates Filing Fee Disclosure & Payment Methods
SEC Modernizes Fee Payments U.S. financial markets regulator, the SEC is revising “most fee-bearing forms, schedules, and related rules” and requiring companies and funds to “include all required information for filing fee calculation in a structured format,” officials announced. The regulator has “adopted amendments to modernize filing fee disclosure and payment methods” that will… Read More >>
