JPMorgan's Dark Legacy Continues: A Colossal $348 Million Fine Levied

The Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) are hitting banking giant JPMorgan Chase with a $348.20 million fine in a coordinated enforcement action.

Both the Fed and the OCC say JPMorgan engaged in “unsafe or unsound banking practices” in relation to its trade surveilling program.

The OCC says that since 2019, JPMorgan operated with gaps in its trade surveillance program, leading to the bank’s failure to adequately monitor its traders and clients for potential market misconduct in billions of trading instances.

Meanwhile, the Fed says JPMorgan’s trade surveillance program had been deficient at certain points in time from 2014 to 2023. The Fed says the deficiencies allowed the trillion-dollar lender’s corporate and investment bank division to operate without “adequate data oversight and reconciliation processes to achieve effective and comprehensive trade surveillance.”

On top of the monetary penalty, the two regulatory bodies issued cease-and-desist orders to JPMorgan requiring the bank to take extensive actions to improve its trade surveillance program.

The OCC orders JPMorgan to create an action plan that provides a detailed description of the steps needed for its trade surveillance program to achieve compliance, along with a reasonable timeline for completion and the name of the person responsible for accomplishing the regulator’s remedial measures.

As for the Fed, the regulator requires the bank to get an independent third party that will be tasked to assess JPMorgan’s trade surveillance program in different areas including measures to detect market misconduct and measures to address instances of non-surveilled trading activities.

Since 2000, JPMorgan Chase has paid $39.34 billion in total fines imposed by US regulators, enforcement agencies and lawsuits related to anti-competitive practices, securities abuses and other violations.

That’s according to data from the Violation Tracker, a comprehensive corporate misconduct database.

The bank made $49.6 billion in profit last year.

This article originally appeared on the Daily Hodl