BNP Paribas Fined $100,000 for Reporting Failures

The US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has issued BNP Paribas Securities with a $100,000 fine for reporting failures within its broker-dealers. 

FINRA found that, in 2011, BNP had set up an automated reporting system for its over-the counter options activity. However, owing to a programming error, the system did not work and failed to report the trades correctly. The error was only uncovered almost three years later when FINRA asked BNP for trading data that it was unable to provide. As a result, BNP failed to report 676 transactions between December 2011 and February 2014.

Once the error was found, BNP switched to a manual process, however the system remained flawed. 

FINRA issued a fine of $60,000 for the initial breach and $40,000 for the second. The fine is comparatively small, which reflects that the action was neither deliberate nor malicious.