The Australian Securities and Investment Commission has accepted a court-enforceable undertaking from Vantage Global Prime Pty Ltd, which deals in contracts for differences on behalf of HNW 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.

Having investigated the financial firm, ASIC said that Vantage lacked 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 the benefit of the personal trading of the senior employee. There is no evidence that any of Vantage's clients suffered losses, however, and Vantage did not obtain a benefit from the senior employee’s trading either.

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 a so-called ethics centre.