FCA slaps GBP 1 mln fine on Interactive Brokers UK

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UK’s financial services regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), has fined the UK branch of the US brokerage Interactive Brokers (IBUK) with GBP 1,049,412.
The reason for the punishment are failings in IBUK’s post-trade systems and controls for identifying and reporting suspicious transactions in the period February 2014 to February 2015.
IBUK is based in London and executes and arranges transactions in various financial instruments, including CFDs directly for its UK clients and for other clients across the Interactive Brokers group of companies. Part of the activities, the post-trade monitoring in particular, was delegated to a team of IB employees in the US. However, the FCA found that IBUK has failed to adequately calibrate and test the post-trade monitoring systems to ensure potential market fraud by clients would be captured. Besides, IBUK did not provide oversight and quality control of the activities of the US team, did not monitor their reports and did not provide adequate training for the employees conducting the post-trade monitoring.
Consequently, IBUK failed to report to the FCA suspicious trading activity and the watchdog has established there were at least three occasions of market abuse in the relevant period.


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