About a-team Marketing Services
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry
The knowledge platform for the financial technology industry

A-Team Insight Blogs

FCA Sees Suspicious Transactions Decline for 2019

Subscribe to our newsletter

The UK financial watchdog has seen the number of suspicious transactions and order reports (STORs) go down for the first time since 2016, according to its latest STORs report for December 2019. The regulator suggests that more robust steps taken by firms to tackle financial crime risks could be part of the reason for the decline, along with its recent supervisory crackdown on compliance.

Chapter 8 of the FCA’s Financial Crime Guide, published in December 2018, highlighted firms’ obligations to counter the risk of being used to further financial crime, including the criminal offences of insider dealing and market manipulation. The steps taken by some firms, since then, include reviewing the suitability of clients whose trading may otherwise have been subject of a STOR and restricting their access to financial markets where appropriate.

“We believe these restrictions have resulted in less suspicious activity being facilitated by these firms, and consequently a reduction in STORs,” says the regulator.

The 2019 figures do however suggest that the number of commodity and fixed income STORs continue to rise. This reflects steps taken by firms to improve their detection capabilities, and the FCA has encouraged firms to continue developing their surveillance capabilities in this area.

“We have also seen an increase in the number of market observations received,” notes the FCA. “Market observations provide us with valuable intelligence and we encourage their submission where a STOR is not appropriate.”

Market Observations were launched in 2019, designed to provide a channel for firms to submit information about market activity they have observed which is not necessarily appropriate as a STOR.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related content

WEBINAR

Recorded Webinar: Detecting and preventing market abuse

Market abuse – unlawful disclosure of inside information, insider trading, circular trading, “pump and dump” schemes, etc. – poses significant threats to the integrity of capital markets. In 2024, global trading house Trafigura agreed to pay a $55 million fine to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for trading with non-public information, manipulating a...

BLOG

Addressing Financial Crime and AML with RegTech: Insights from the RegTech Summit 2024

Since the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) was enacted 54 years ago to prevent and detect money laundering and terrorist financing, the compliance obligation has evolved from a basic reporting requirement into a highly complex and continually evolving anti-money laundering (AML) regime. An expert panel at A-Team Group’s RegTech Summit (NYC) in November convened to evaluate...

EVENT

ESG Data & Tech Briefing London

The ESG Data & Tech Briefing will explore challenges around assembling and evaluating ESG data for reporting and the impact of regulatory measures and industry collaboration on transparency and standardisation efforts. Expert speakers will address how the evolving market infrastructure is developing and the role of new technologies and alternative data in improving insight and filling data gaps.

GUIDE

The Global LEI System – A Solution for Entity Data?

The Global LEI System – or GLEIS – has been in development since the middle of last year. Development has been patchy at times, but much has been done, leaving fewer outstanding issues, but also raising new questions. What’s emerging is a structure for the GLEIS going forward, complete with a mechanism for registering and...