Citigroup will pay almost $2 million to settle SEC allegation that two of the bank's brokerages recommended trades to customers without appropriately mailing disclosures to them.
The brokerages recommended trades to roughly 13,600 customers who weren't mailed required disclosures of the broker's obligation to act in the customer's best interest, the Securities and Exchange Commission said in its settlement order.
Under SEC guidelines, a customer has to affirmatively opt in to getting disclosures delivered electronically. But Citi stopped mailing documents to customers unless they objected, the agency said. As a result, the 31,600 securities recommendations that Citi made to those customers from June 2020 to at least March 2021 were in breach of securities rules, according to the SEC.
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A spokeswoman for Citi declined to comment. The bank didn't admit to or deny the SEC's findings. The bank mailed the documents to the customers by April 2021.
