(Bloomberg) -- The Financial Conduct Authority had a new warning for firms in its latest market newsletter — make sure to turn on the news.

The British regulator said it discovered one firm, whose monitoring software failed to generate alerts flagging potential insider dealing for three years. The unidentified company didn’t notice that the news feed hadn’t been activated in its new monitoring software. It meant the system had no news stories to consider when tracking significant price moves and suspicious trading. 

“It was unsurprising that alerts were not generated,” the regulator said in the latest market watch newsletter.

The firm, which was particularly active in cash equities only became aware of the failure when the FCA asked why it hadn’t submitted a suspicious trading report. 

It’s just the latest example of the FCA seeking to test financial services firms’ trading surveillance systems and the underlying logic behind them. HSBC Holdings Plc was fined £64 million ($80 million) after the watchdog found a series of monitoring failures including one example where staff suppressed monitoring systems that halted all the alerts in Wales. That meant the bank had to retrospectively file 1,780 suspicious activity reports.

The regulator said it assessed nine investment banks last year over the effectiveness of their trading surveillance.

 

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