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New Zealand, Tiger Brokers
The Auckland High Court has ordered Tiger Brokers (NZ) Limited to pay NZ$900,000 ($547,245) for breaching the anti-money laundering and counter terrorism finance controls. Proceedings were brought by the Financial Markets Authority. 

The FMA’s case relates to Tiger Brokers’ AML/CFT policies, processes, controls, and obligation to file suspicious activity reports. “It does not allege that Tiger Brokers has allowed money laundering or financing of terrorism to take place,” FMA said in a statement yesterday. 

The FMA case rested on four causes of action that Tiger Brokers has admitted to, including: 

-- Failing to conduct customer due diligence (including standard, enhanced and additional customer due diligence on certain clients); 
-- Failing to terminate an existing business relationship with any customer where it was unable to conduct customer due diligence; 
-- Failing to report suspicious activities; and 
-- Failing to keep records in accordance with the Act’s requirements. 

The effect of Tiger’s breaches was that, between April 2019 and January 2020, about $NZD60.8 million was transacted through New Zealand’s financial system without proper checks and controls in place. Tiger’s customer due diligence and record-keeping breaches were of the greatest magnitude – the former extended to a least 3,768 customers. 

“The record-keeping breaches were representative of Tiger’s weak compliance approach across its business which, in the 2019-2020 AML/CFT reporting year, comprised between 69,705 and 126,230 customers and transactions to a gross total value of between NZ$3.6 billion and NZ$35.2 billion.  

The FMA investigation into these breaches began following a formal warning issued to Tiger Brokers in April 2020.

As reported in May, Tiger Brokers had to delist its trading platform, called Tiger Trade, from app stores in mainland China following moves by Chinese regulators. Tiger Brokers made the change to comply with the China Securities Regulatory Commission’s requirements on its cross-border operations in the country.