Commonwealth Bank's stockbroking arm has paid $700,000 in fines and refunded $1.1 million in fees after the corporate regulator issued infringement notices related to past technical issues with its trading systems.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission says it had reasonable grounds to believe that CommSec breached the Corporations Act between August 2010 and February 2014 by failing to disclose it was acting for both buyer and seller on 114,841 transactions.
It also suggested there were 50,484 transactions in which the bank did not disclose it was the principal in a deal rather than an agent, and that between August 2010 and April 2014 it did not have adequate organisational and technical procedures or controls to check the identity of those submitting orders to sell stock.
ASIC said the issues were caused by technical problems, including notification failures arising from interactions between trading systems.
"We acknowledge and regret these process errors. There were no losses to customers and the errors have now been rectified. We notified relevant customers and no complaints or issues have been raised," CommSec managing director Paul Rayson said.
