UBS and Credit Suisse have joined other Wall Street firms in agreeing to pay fines to settle charges over messaging violations in the United States.
The two Swiss banks were among eleven institutions agreeing to pay fines of a combined total of $1.8 billion levied by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), according to a «Financial Times» (behind paywall) report Wednesday.
The fines are related to what were deemed «widespread» and «longstanding» failures of record keeping as executives were using text messaging services on their mobile devices in what the SEC called «pervasive off-channel» communications.
CFTC commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero said that such violations were well known internally with the banks «but no one stopped it.»
The Fines
UBS and Credit Suisse will each pay $200 million, according to the «FT» article, the same amount that Barclay's, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley agreed to pay. Only Bank of America had to pay a larger fine of $225 million. Smaller ones were levied against Nomura, Jefferies, and Cantor Fitzgerald, according to the story.
Of the $1.8 billion total, $1.1 billion were levied by the SEC and $710 million by the CFTC.
Both regulators said the institutions admitted to the facts which were laid out in the settlement orders, but Bank of America and Nomura did not admit or deny certain findings to the CFTC, according to the «Financial Times».
