Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC and Citigroup Global Markets, Inc. agreed to pay over $2.96 million each to settle SEC charges of misleading investors about a foreign exchange trading program.
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The SEC settled charges against a bank for misleading mutual fund companies and other custody clients by applying hidden markups to foreign currency exchange trades.
The SEC announced that Securities Exchange Act Rule 15b12-1 will expire on July 31, 2016. From that point on, only CFTC-registered futures commission merchants (that are not registered dually with the SEC as broker-dealers), retail foreign exchange dealers and certain banks may serve as counterparties in retail forex transactions.
SEC Commissioner Kara M. Stein called on the SEC and market participants to work "together to surf" the "wave of innovation" occurring in U.S. capital markets. In her remarks at the Harvard Law School Fidelity Guest Lecture Series, Commissioner Stein made the following recommendations to regulators to help them keep up with innovation: Being Proactive: A Competitive Necessity in the New Landscape . Commissioner Stein emphasized that regulators will have to determine how to regulate technological advances such as "robo advisors," bitcoin and "blockchain," which is a "database network where