Deutsche Bank Fined $37 Million

WASHINGTON (CN) – Deutsche Bank will pay $37 million to settle SEC and federal prosecutors’ charges of misleading clients about an automatic router that sent orders to dark pools.

The SEC and the New York attorney general on Friday said they had settled parallel cases against the bank for $18.5 million each.

“Deutsche Bank claimed to be using ongoing data analysis to rank the dark pools best suited for customer orders when in reality its system failed to actually do this analysis,” SEC Enforcement Director Andrew Ceresney said in a statement.

Deutsche Bank claimed its SuperX+ order router “smartly routes and selects optimal pools of liquidity on an order by order basis,” but the bank updated the ranking just once in two years, the SEC said, causing at least two dark pools to be overrated.