Barclays Assessed an Additional $150 Million Penalty

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By Jacob Maslow

Barclays (NYSE:BCS) has been assessed an additional $150 million penalty over misconduct charges in the company’s foreign exchange currency branch. The company will also have to fire a top official due to misconduct.

The bank has been fined due to evidence that the company used a trading system to automatically reject orders that were deemed unprofitable. The bank based these cancelations on millisecond upswings wherein the transaction would be put on hold before being declined.

When customers inquired about the transactions being declined, the company stated that it was due to technical issues or never responded thoroughly.

New York regulators have, in total, penalize the company for over $635 million for misconduct and manipulation charges. The regulator of Barclays’s US operations, Anthony Albanese, states that greater oversight needs to be taken by the company to help prevent the misuse of electronic trading on Wall Street.

Barclays has not commented on the additional penalty that has now been assessed. A complex system that the bank used would provide a short delay between the customer’s order and the actual transition occurring. Within this delay., Barclays would compare the customers price before and after the hold and reject any trade that the system deemed to be unprofitable

Investigations into the bank show that the automated system rejected foreign-exchange trades that were not in favor of the bank.

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