Summit Equities will pay $100 million tied to the mishandling of private client information in Massachusetts.
According to a consent order recently issued by the state's securities division, Parsippany, New Jersey-based Summit Equities failed to supervise four registered agents, who no longer are employed with it and one of whom was fired, from January 2013 to February 2018.
These individuals and a sales assistant entered clients' personal information into third-party customer relations management systems, which violated the broker-dealer's privacy and security policies.
Summit had no access or control over the information — including Social Security numbers, account and insurance details — when its agents stopped working for the firm. It had measures in place to delete client information from agents' devices but not for third-party systems, such as Redtail's Tailwag CRM.
