Barclays has been hit with a $150 million (€141m) penalty for allegedly using its foreign exchange electronic trading platform to reject unprofitable trades and lying to clients about why their transactions were turned down.

The New York Department of Financial Services also ordered Barclays to fire the global head of electronic fixed income, currencies, and commodities automated flow trading as part of the settlement announced yesterday.

Essentially, Barclays used algorithms to hold trades for a microsecond. If markets moved in favour of the bank, the trade went through. If the client would have benefited, the trades were turned down.

Barclays also had a much larger $2.4 billon fine in May for foreign exchange trading abuses. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015