ASIC has accepted a court enforceable undertaking from Vantage Global Prime Pty Limited (Vantage).

Vantage is an Australian Financial Services licensee that is authorised to deal in financial products including CFDs to retail and wholesale clients. CFDs are derivative financial products that are generally not bought or sold on an exchange traded market in Australia. A CFD is an agreement that allows a client to take a position on the fluctuation in the price of an underlying product.

Following an investigation, ASIC identified concerns that Vantage did not have in place adequate systems and controls to identify, monitor for, prevent and respond to inappropriate use of its confidential client trading information by its employees for their own personal benefit.

ASIC's investigation identified that a senior employee of Vantage used their position to access confidential client trading information. The confidential client trading information was accessed to inform the personal trading of the senior employee.  There is no evidence that any of Vantage clients suffered loss from the use of their confidential trading information. Although the senior employee made a profit from accessing client confidential information, Vantage did not obtain a benefit from the senior employee’s trading.

Vantage will appoint an independent expert to assess and evaluate the adequacy of and implementation of its systems and controls to deal with improper access to its client confidential information.

Vantage has also undertaken to:

• not appoint the senior employee as a director for a period of 12 months
• arrange for all its representatives to complete compliance training
• make a community benefit payment of $95,000 to The Ethics Centre.

Download the enforceable undertaking

Editor's note:

Vantage offered and ASIC agreed to accept this undertaking as an alternative to pursuing civil or administrative action. Under s93AA of the ASIC Act, in the event there is a breach and the court is satisfied a person has breached a term of an undertaking, ASIC can obtain orders from the court to enforce compliance.