The SEC reports that Rhea Kemble Dignam, currently director of the SEC’s Atlanta regional office (ARO), has been named senior counsel to the director of the SEC’s Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations (OCIE). Dignam, who joined the SEC as the Atlanta regional office director in March 2010, will assume her new post when Liban… Read More >>
Regulators Hit Barclays with $62 Million in Fines
Taken together, Barclays Capital and Barclays Bank will be paying a total of $61,913,453 in penalties to U.S. and U.K. regulators for two past incidents — an inadequate compliance system for wealth management efforts, and a failure to properly protect clients’ custody assets. In the U.S., Barclays Capital is paying a $15 million penalty to… Read More >>
Regulatory Guidelines Combat Social Media Compliance Fears
The financial services industry should thank regulators for establishing the rules of the game for social media compliance because it spurred the enormous adoption of social media strategies, according to a panel of experts and industry insiders at FTF’s Social Media and Compliance (SMAC) in financial services event, which took place in downtown New York… Read More >>
SEC’s L.A. Examinations Director to Retire
The SEC reports that Martin Murphy, its associate regional director for examinations in the agency’s Los Angeles office, is retiring after more than 36 years of public service, including 24 years at the SEC, officials say. As associate regional director for the SEC’s office of compliance inspections and examinations since 2008, Murphy has led a… Read More >>
Billion-Dollar Settlements Sting A-List Banks and Investors
The best known aphorism attributed to the late U.S. Senator Everett Dirksen, the honey-voiced Republican Minority Leader in the LBJ era, is “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.” One wonders what Dirksen would make of the multi-billion-dollar settlements that Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and other giant banks… Read More >>
A Compliance Speed Bump in an Era of ‘Social Selling’
LinkedIn, a social media site for business interactions, is hoping to take “social selling” to the next level via an upgrade of Sales Navigator to a software-as-a-service (SasS), enterprise-wide offering. Anticipating demand for Sales Navigator, social media compliance provider Hearsay Social is developing capabilities to help its financial services clients use the sales tool and… Read More >>
SEC’s New Sheriff vs. the D.C. Corral
Mary Jo White’s SEC appears to be taking decisive action against the alleged, undeclared insider trading and controversial influence peddling that Congress has taken for granted for decades. This became abundantly clear when the regulator set its sights on 44 firms that allegedly benefited from Washington, D.C.-based insider trading. Over the coming weeks and months,… Read More >>
SEC to Probe 44 Firms for Insider Trading
The number of hedge funds, asset management and other investment firms under suspicion in a SEC insider-trading probe involving an alleged Congressional tip-off recently expanded to 44, giving it the potential to become the largest insider-trading case of all time. The probe, which involves “some of the largest hedge funds and asset management advisers in… Read More >>
E&Y to Pay $4M to Settle SEC Charges
The SEC has charged Ernst & Young (E&Y), one of the Big Four auditing firms, with violations of auditor independence rules that prohibit lobbying and require firms to maintain “objectivity and impartiality” with clients, officials say. The firm has agreed to pay $4.07 million in “monetary sanctions” to settle the charges, though, according to reports,… Read More >>
New Derivatives Rules to Burden Ops
Josh Brodman must be a little nostalgic for the time—only about a year ago—when the fine print of the clearing and execution reforms for derivatives trading was still being finalized. At the time, he was an operations manager for a multi-strategy, event-driven fund with several billion under management. Life is much different now for Brodman,… Read More >>
