UBS Wealth Management Fined by UK Regulator

Contributing Editor

17 November 2005

UBS Wealth Management has been fined £100,000 by the UK regulator, the Financial Services Authority, for failures in its systems for the reporting of transactions in financial instruments between May 1999 and October 2005. The problem was uncovered when UBS Wealth Management made a suspicious transaction report to the FSA in July 2005. The FSA reviewed this report and found that the transaction was incorrectly reported as a client sale, rather than a client purchase. The regulator then found that since October 1999 all equity transcations executed by UBS Wealth Management with outside brokers had been incorrectly reported to the FSA. The Swiss bank was denoted as principal when it was in fact the agent, the FSA said. “The FSA relies on firms to provide accurate transaction reports to enable it to maintain confidence in the financial markets and reduce financial crime,” the FSA said in a statement. An FSA spokesman told WealthBriefing: "This was a miscoding issue in UBS's bespoke software. It was an innocent mistake and the fine reflects the period of time that the mistake went unnoticed rather than the fact that it was a malicious or fraudulent action." He added: “No clients were affected by the failure". In a statement today from UBS, the Swiss bank said: “UBS accepts the sanction imposed by the FSA and will continue to cooperate fully with our regulators.”