Arive Capital Markets

Arive Capital Markets An AWC was fined $45,000 for failing to develop and implement an AML compliance program reasonably designed to achieve and monitor its compliance with requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act.

The findings stated that the firm failed to establish and implement policies and procedures that could be reasonably expected to detect and cause the reporting of potentially suspicious activity related to low-priced securities transactions.

The firm’s AML manual failed to explain how to identity or investigate suspicious trading activity, failed to list some of the most common red flags of suspicious activity, failed to address the process for identifying and assessing potential red flags associated with the sale of low-priced securities and did not provide guidance about how to utilize the reports and tools the firm had at its disposal to monitor for suspicious trading.

The findings also stated that firm registered representatives had customer accounts that engaged in a pattern of trading shares in a particular low-priced security that comprised a significant volume of the total trading in the stock.

The firm failed to take reasonable steps to identify, investigate and address numerous red flags, and because of these failures, the firm failed to detect the suspicious trading in the low-priced security.

The findings also included that the firm failed to conduct annual independent testing on a calendar-year basis of its AMLCP.