Prudential Brokerage to Pay $11 Million for Delayed Fund Orders

Pruco Securities LLC, the brokerage run by Prudential Financial Inc., (PRU) will pay customers at least $10.7 million to make up for delays in placing more than 850,000 mutual fund orders.

Trades were placed one to two days after the orders arrived by fax or mail, causing some customers to get inferior prices from late 2003 until June 2011, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said today in a statement. Finra also fined Pruco $550,000 for the errors and oversight failures.

Companies must price mutual fund orders that arrive before 4 p.m. on the day they’re received, Finra said. Prudential, the second-largest U.S. life insurer, managed $132 billion for retail customers at its retirement division as of Sept. 30.

Prudential reported the errors to Finra after discovering them when looking into a delay in executing a faxed order.

“Once we did discover it, we moved as quickly as we could to make certain that we had notified Finra and took steps to prevent it from happening again,” said Bob DeFillippo, a spokesman for the Newark, New Jersey-based company. “We are going to make certain that anybody who was harmed receives what they are entitled to plus interest.”

The errors resulted in some customers receiving more favorable pricing, and those customers won’t see adjustments that cut the value of their accounts, he said.

Prudential retreated 0.4 percent to $53.02 at 11:30 a.m. in New York. The shares have gained 5.8 percent this year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Zachary Tracer in New York at ztracer1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Scheer at dscheer@bloomberg.net