The Financial Stability Oversight Council ("FSOC") voted to designate MetLife, Inc. as a non-bank systemically important financial institution. In response to the designation, MetLife issued a statement expressing disappointment with FSOC's decision, explaining that it believes "MetLife is not systemically important under the Dodd-Frank Act's criteria, and the company has presented substantial and compelling evidence to FSOC to support this conclusion." Se e: FSOC Readout from December 18, 2014 Meeting; FSOC MetLife Designation. See also: FSOC Proposes Preliminary Designation of MetLife as a

The NFA issued a Notice to Members reminding them that regulatory filings will be impacted by the 2015 holidays. The filing schedule is as follows: Christmas Day - December 25, 2014 Daily segregated, 30.7 secured, cleared swaps customer collateral and daily forex statements prepared as of December 24, 2014 are required to be submitted by 12:00 noon on December 26, 2014; Daily segregated statements are not required to be prepared as of December 25, 2014; and Daily 30.7 secured, cleared swaps customer collateral and daily forex statements are required to be prepared as of December 25, 2014 and

FINRA issued an Investor Alert titled "Physical Precious Metals: Tips to Avoid Tarnishing Your Portfolio." The alert is intended to warn investors of the risks involved with investing in physical precious metals such as silver, gold, palladium and platinum. The alert provided tips to help investors that included the following: say "no" to pushy salespeople; use the NFA Background Affiliation Status Information Center ("BASIC") to check whether a firm or individual is registered with the CFTC or an NFA member, and whether the firm or individual was the subject of any disciplinary action; don't

FINRA ordered Wells Fargo Advisors and Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network, two broker-dealers under common control, to pay a fine for anti-money laundering ("AML") failures. According to FINRA, the firms' Customer Identification Program ("CIP") contained a design flaw that, over the course of nine years, created a deficiency in the way in which the transaction-processing system assigned customer identifiers to new accounts. The glitch resulted in the firms' failure to conduct customer identity verification for nearly 220,000 of such accounts. FINRA imposed a joint fine of $1.5 million on

The CFTC announced that Judge Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered Royal Bank of Canada ("RBC") to pay a penalty for engaging in more than 1,000 illegal wash sales, fictitious sales and noncompetitive transactions involving stock futures contracts over a three-year period. The Court found that RBC knowingly executed sales of narrow-based stock index futures and single stock futures contracts as block trades through its branches and international trading accounts, trading opposite of two of RBC's offshore subsidiaries and executed on the