JPMorgan to pay $100M for client order monitoring fails: CFTC

Firm did not monitor of billions of client orders over 7-year period.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. failed to properly monitor billions of client orders between 2014 and 2021, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The CFTC said Thursday the bank would pay $100 million to settle a multiyear probe into JPMorgan’s trade monitoring, in addition to fines it’s already agreed to pay the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

In 2021, while on-boarding a new exchange, JPMorgan staff discovered significant gaps in its surveillance of trade data, according to the CFTC. Billions of orders over seven years were not being monitored by the bank across at least 30 trading venues, the regulator said.

In response to a request for comment, a JPMorgan spokesperson pointed to a previous statement by the bank on the issue.

“We self-identified the issue, significant remedial actions have been taken and others are underway; and we have not found any employee misconduct or harm to clients or the market in our review of the previously uncaptured data,” said the bank’s statement. “We do not expect any disruption of service to clients as a result of these resolutions.”

In the settlement order, JPMorgan indicated that the surveillance gaps were resolved by 2023. The bank admitted to some of the CFTC’s allegations. In addition to the CFTC fine, JPMorgan agreed to hire an independent consultant to review the bank’s trade surveillance and fix any issues they find.

In March, JPMorgan agreed to pay the Fed and OCC a total of more than $300 million to settle their investigations into the matter. As a condition of the OCC settlement, the bank wasn’t allowed to add new trading venues without receiving approval from that regulator.