The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) announced reprimanding Credit Suisse Securities (Hong Kong) Limited. The regulator fined Credit Suisse $2.1 million for regulatory breaches related to failures in its electronic trading systems.
The Hong Kong watchdog uncovered that between 09:39 and 09:47 on 28 February 2019, the company submitted 16,935 erroneous market making quotes to the market, which resulted in execution of 8,042 stock options trades at prices that deviated from the then prevailing market prices.
The incident was caused by a logic error in the symbol mapping programme used by Credit Suisse generating market making quotes.
The SFC determined that Credit Suisse’s internal controls and regular tests in place at the time failed to prevent or promptly detect the errors and these failures constitute breaches of electronic trading requirements.
In its decision regarding the sanction, the SFC took into account relevant circumstances, such as the prompt remedial actions taken by Credit Suisse following the incident and its cooperation with the SFC in resolving the regulator’s concerns.
The Australian Securities and Investments Commission announced in July that the Australian unit of Credit Suisse Equities Limited paid a penalty of $75,000 to comply with an infringement notice from the Markets Disciplinary Panel (the MDP).
