RBC DS admits order-marking failures

RBC Dominion Securities Inc. has agreed to a $140,000 fine in a settlement with the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) after admitting to order-marking failures.

A regulatory hearing panel approved a settlement between the firm and IIROC staff, which saw the firm admit to violating the self-regulatory organization’s trading rules by not including proper order designations on “numerous orders” on IIROC-regulated markets between 2017 and 2021.

Specifically, the firm failed to tag orders executed for insiders and significant shareholders, it improperly tagged certain prop trades as client orders, and it failed to mark certain short-selling orders.

Most of the issues were attributed to software updates to the firm’s internal trading platforms, the settlement noted, although some of the issues involved traders failing to manually mark short orders.

These errors meant the firm’s internal surveillance and trade supervision “was based on erroneous underlying data,” it said, adding that the errors also impacted IIROC’s ability to oversee the markets.

The violations were self-reported to the SRO, and have since been corrected, the settlement said.

Under the settlement, RBC DS is fined $140,000 and agreed to pay $22,500 in costs.

James Langton

James is a senior reporter for Advisor.ca and its sister publication, Investment Executive. He has been reporting on regulation, securities law, industry news and more since 1994.