OSC v. Royal Bank of Canada (FX supervision and controls, 2019)

Settled

Checked against the primary document on October 2, 2026. The library's summary, tags and figures for this record were compared with the regulator's own document by an AI model (Claude) following written instructions, with sampled and disputed records read a second time. No lawyer has reviewed them. A checked record can still contain errors, and checked does not mean endorsed. See how we check records or report a correction.

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In 2019 the Ontario Securities Commission approved a settlement with Royal Bank of Canada over weak supervision and controls in its foreign exchange business, including confidential customer information shared in multi-dealer chatrooms between 2011 and 2013. RBC made a voluntary payment of C$13,552,000 and paid C$800,000 in costs. Staff did not allege front running or any other specific market abuse.

The record

Structured fields for this action, as recorded in our case library.
Agency	OSC
Release number	2019-32
Date filed	2019-08-26
Date resolved	2019-08-30
Court	Capital Markets Tribunal (Ontario)
Status	settled
Asset class	bonds, fx
Venue	OTC
Criminal parallel	No
Defendants	Royal Bank of Canada (entity)
Techniques

What was ordered

Civil penalty: —
Disgorgement: —
Prejudgment interest: —
Total relief: —
Alleged gain: —
Penalty as published: C$13.6m

A dash means the release did not state a figure we could extract, not that the figure is zero. Penalty and disgorgement are stored separately so aggregates across the library do not double-count the same dollars. This regulator states penalties in CAD. The figure is recorded as published and is not converted, so it does not appear in the USD totals or medians used elsewhere on this site.

What is alleged to have happened

The Ontario Securities Commission filed its statement of allegations on August 26, 2019 and approved the settlement on August 30, 2019.

Staff alleged that over at least three years RBC did not have sufficient supervision and controls in its FX trading business, that traders disclosed confidential customer information in chatrooms and that compliance monitoring problems continued into 2015. The settlement states that Staff was not alleging specific violations of the kinds it lists, among them front running, layering and wash trades, which it described only to guide market participants.

RBC undertook an internal audit of its FX Global Code compliance, the voluntary payment of C$13,552,000 was designated for the Commission's use, and it paid C$800,000 in costs. The five technique tags previously shown (front running, FX fixing, insider trading, layering, wash trading) came from that guidance list and have all been removed.

For the regulator's own account of the facts, read the primary document linked above. This page deliberately summarises the structured record rather than reproducing the release.

Timeline

Primary documents

Everything on this page derives from the documents below. Where our summary and the primary document disagree, the primary document is right.

The linked release is published by the issuing regulator under its own terms. Our summary and narrative above are our own writing.

Record added September 10, 2026. submit a correction.