The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority fined two non-bank Wells Fargo & Co. affiliates $1.5 million for failing to verify the identities of hundreds of thousands of clients with securities accounts. The self-regulatory organization, known as Finra, said in a consent letter Thursday that the transaction processing system used by Wells Fargo Advisors, LLC and Wells Fargo Advisors Financial Network, LLC sometimes assigned identifiers from closed accounts to newly-opened accounts. The glitch allowed approximately three percent of the institutions' 6.9 million accounts opened from 2003 through 2012 to bypass anti-money laundering (AML) controls on customer verification, Finra said. The firms first...
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