MyComplianceOffice Blog

Employees who work at firms in the financial services industry are privy to sensitive information of all kinds. There are many ways for employees to abuse this information beyond garden-variety insider trading. As the ways bad actors can misuse information and manipulate the market getincreasingly sophisticated, the need for equally sophisticated compliance technology to keep up continues to grow.  

The 1MDB scandal saw Malaysia’s former Prime Minister jailed for 12 years with a fine of 210m Malaysian Ringgit (USD $46.8m) - and the end of the 61-year political dominance of the country’s Barisan Nasional coalition political party.

On March 23, 2020, the following statement was released from Stephanie Avakian and Steven Peikin, Co-Directors of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement.

On May 7, 2019, U.S. Representative James Himes (D-Conn) introduced the “Insider Trading Prohibition Act,” which would amend the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, by inserting a new section that defines the elements of criminal insider trading. The bill was passed unanimously in the House Financial Services Committee on May 10. 

Technology makes keeping material non-public information (MNPI) in compliance with securities laws and regulations a lot easier. As a longstanding priority to prevent insiders from wielding unfair market advantage, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have explicit guidelines surrounding the sharing of MNPI among corporate insiders in advance of trading and investment deals.[1]