JPMorgan's securities arm has been fined ￡33.32m ($49m), the largest penalty ever levied by the UK financial regulator, for failing to protect billions of dollars of client money by keeping it in segregated accounts.
At the height of the financial crisis, JPMorgan's futures and options business was keeping up to $23bn in institutional client money mixed up with its own in an unsegregated account at the larger bank. Had the bank run into financial difficulties, clients such as pension funds and hedge funds would have been at risk of losing their money.
The administrators of Lehman Brothers, the failed US investment bank, are still trying to disentangle its books due to similar problems, and the judges handling Lehman-related lawsuits have criticised the UK Financial Services Authority's supervision of client money.