AMP Life has been charged a penalty of $275,500 for breaching reporting rules on more than 10,000 derivative transactions over the course of 32 months.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) says the contraventions were not “dishonest or deliberate” but rather the result of “administrative failing” related to AMP Life’s reporting processes and systems.

Between August 2015 and February 2018 the life insurer failed to report information about 940 transactions entered into in New Zealand on 113 occasions, ASIC says.

It also failed to correctly report “collateral” information about 9224 transactions on 388 occasions, or ensure the local operations of banking group BNP Paribas reported full information on its behalf.

AMP Life delegated its reporting of over-the-counter derivatives transactions entirely to AMP Capital, which further delegated that reporting to BNP Paribas. AMP Capital Investors was fined $250,500.

The New Zealand transaction reporting failures went on for 11 months, while the collateral failures took more than two years to come to AMP Life’s notice.

“The time taken to identify the reporting problems that caused the contraventions shows serious inadequacies in AMP Life’s internal and outsourced processes and procedures for monitoring the accuracy of its reporting,” ASIC says.

“There was a systemic failure in ensuring that the information reported, and the changes to that information were and remained complete, accurate and current.”

Reporting rules require counterparties to report derivative transaction and position information to trade repositories. This supports the detection and prevention of market abuse, ASIC says.

AMP was charged $500 for each of the 501 business separate business days it breached the reporting rules, plus a $25,000 fine.

ASIC says it “considers that the breaches arose out of administrative failings. However, the duration of each of the reporting failures was significant and the time taken to identify them shows serious inadequacies in AMP Life's and AMP Capital's processes and procedures for monitoring the accuracy of their reporting”.

IN February AMP Life was fined $5.175 million for six contraventions of section 961L of the Corporations Act. The former insurance heavyweight had already agreed in October 2018 to sell its life business to international insurer Resolution Life for $3.3 billion.