Written by Don Lee FINRA announced today that it has fined Raymond James & Associates $17 Million for failures related to their Anti Money Laundering Programs as well as a personal fine for the prior AMLCO of $25,000 and 3 months suspension. The $17 Million fine was split $8 Million for Raymond James and Associates and $9 Million for Raymond James...
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Written By: Don Lee FINRA’s Executive Vice President of enforcement Brad Bennett highlighted two trends that FINRA is seeing in enforcement during his speech at SIFMA’s AML and Financial Crimes conference. Firstly, he mentioned that firms must have an adequate system for monitoring suspicious activities. These systems must be properly...
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Written by Don Lee Today Morgan Stanley agreed to pay $8.8 Million to settle charges for prearranged trading or “parking” that favored certain advisory client’s accounts. This was done with SG Americas the US subsidiary of the French conglomerate Societe Generale who was also fined $1 Million and the broker/ trader barred for 3 years...
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Written by Don Lee In the recent Technology Tools for Today conference hosted by Investment News on November 2nd in Florida, Big Data was once again a topic among the financial community. The general consensus among the broker dealers present was “the additional uses of Big Data is likely to spur more attention from government and industry...
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Written by Don Lee Is your firm spending enough on compliance? That has been one of the main questions over the last few years. Most firms compliance expenditure is primarily on their Chief Compliance Officer because it is a regulatory requirement, but is that enough? Its no secret that the revenues in the financial world have declined so much so that the...
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Written by Don Lee In December of 2014, FINCEN fined MoneyGram’s then Chief Compliance Officer Thomas Haider $1 Million as a civil penalty and was trying to bar him from working in the financial services industry for life (https://www.fincen.gov/news_room/nr/pdf/20141218.pdf). This stems from fraudulent actions by Haider’s employer MoneyGram in...
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