Wells Fargo Advisors and Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network are having to pay FINRA a joint fine of $1.5 million.

The US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has ordered Wells Fargo Advisors and Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network to pay a joint fine of $1.5 million for anti-money laundering failures.

For nine years, the firms failed to comply with a key aspect of the AML compliance programme (regime) for broker-dealers by failing to subject approximately 220,000 new customer accounts to the required identity-verification process. The programme dictates that broker-dealers must establish and maintain a written customer identification 'programme' to govern the way they verify the identity of each client who opens a new account.

FINRA found the firms' 'customer identification programme' system to be deficient, as the electronic systems supporting it contained a design flaw that persisted between 2003 and 2012. When the firms' transaction-processing system (which they seem to have held in common) assigned 'client identifiers' to new accounts, it sometimes recycled identifiers previously assigned to accounts that had been closed.

The two firms neither admitted nor denied the charges, but "consented to the entry of FINRA's findings," presumably into a filing cabinet at FINMA's offices.