Tiger Brokers to pay $900,000 fine for AML/CFT Act breaches in New Zealand
The Auckland High Court has ordered Tiger Brokers (NZ) Limited to pay $900,000 for breaching the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) Act 2009, in proceedings brought by the Financial Markets Authority (FMA).
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 Brokers’s breaches was that, between April 2019 and January 2020, approximately $NZD60.8m was transacted through New Zealand’s financial system without proper checks and controls in place. Tiger Brokers’ customer due diligence and record-keeping breaches were of greatest magnitude — the former extended to a least 3,768 customers.
The record-keeping breaches were representative of Tiger Brokers’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 $3.6 billion and $35.2 billion.
The FMA investigation into these breaches commenced following a formal warning issued to Tiger Brokers in April 2020.
Tiger Brokers is the New Zealand-based subsidiary of Tiger Fintech (Singapore) PTE Limited and provides share brokering services through an online trading platform, Tiger Trade.