Compliance & Ethics

After uncovering years of off-channel communications and discovery failures, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has fined Benjamin F. Edwards & Co. $750,000 and issued a formal censure, closing a case that traces back to supervisory gaps first exposed more than five years ago. The settlement centers on the firm’s failure to properly supervise, preserve, and review business-related text messages used by its registered representatives. It also addresses the firm’s failure to meet discovery obligations during a contentious FINRA arbitration tied to recruiting disputes.

The European Commission has decided that Apple’s advertising service Apple Ads and its mapping service Apple Maps will not be brought under the scope of the EU’s Digital Markets Act, concluding that neither service currently plays a central role in connecting businesses with consumers across the bloc.

German competition regulators have taken one of their strongest steps yet against Amazon’s marketplace practices, curbing how the company can influence seller pricing and ordering it to hand back an estimated €59 million in gains tied to the conduct.

Italy’s competition watchdog has handed eDreams a €9 million fine after concluding that the online travel platform used manipulative design tactics to push customers into paid subscriptions and then made it unnecessarily hard for them to get out.

The European Union's new Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) published its Single Programming Document for 2026–2028, the first multi-year plan since the Authority was established. The document sets out how AMLA intends to move from institutional set-up to day-to-day delivery, offering the clearest signal yet of how EU-level AML supervision will take shape in practice.

Pre-paid mobile phones are supposed to be simple. You top up when you want, use the service when you need it, and stop when you don’t. According to Poland’s consumer watchdog, that promise quietly broke down for thousands of Orange Polska customers. On 4 February 2026, Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) announced that it had fined Orange Polska roughly $8.5 million (PLN 34,030,000) for unlawfully charging fees to pre-paid customers who were deemed “inactive.”

Spain’s competition watchdog has come down hard on the Repsol Group, handing out €20.5 million in fines and temporarily shutting several of its companies out of public fuel contracts after finding that they squeezed rivals out of the diesel market during the most volatile months of 2022.