Credit Suisse fined $2.1m for glitch

The Securities and Futures Commission has reprimanded Credit Suisse and fined it HK$2.1 million for regulatory breaches related to failures in its electronic trading systems.

On February 28 last year, between 9.39am and 9.47am, CSSHK submitted 16,935 erroneous market-making quotes to the market, resulting in the execution of 8,042 stock options trades at prices that deviated from the-then prevailing market prices, the watchdog said yesterday.

A logic error in the symbol mapping program used by CSSHK caused the incident, in its capacity as a stock options market maker, in generating market-making quotes, said the SFC.

The SFC said that CSSHK's internal controls and regular tests in place at the time failed to prevent or promptly detect the incident, which breached the electronic trading requirements under the Code of Conduct.