(Adds details on instructions by some senior Barclays staff toemployees, paragraphs 9-10)
By Suzanne Barlyn
Nov 18 (Reuters) - Barclays Plc will pay an additional $150million to New York State's financial regulator to resolveallegations that it rigged foreign exchange trading by puttingthe bank's interests ahead of those of its clients, theregulator said on Wednesday.
The British bank is also removing a head of globalelectronic trading for foreign exchange-related misconduct, theNew York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) said. Theperson's identity was unclear.
The penalty will be reflected in Barclays' fourth quarter2015 results, the company said. It followed another NYDFSpenalty against Barclays in May, bringing total penalties by theregulator against the bank for forex-related conduct to $635million.
Barclays, in some instances, used a feature called "LastLook" on its forex trading platform to automatically rejectclient orders that would be unprofitable for Barclays because ofprice swings in milliseconds-long hold periods the bank imposedafter trades were placed.
Barclays, however, did not disclose to clients that thetrades were being rejected, but instead cited technical issuesor gave vague responses, NYDFS said.
Industry guidelines warn banks not to abuse "last look"rights to reject deals on foreign exchange platforms.
Barclays revised its "Last Look" feature last year, afterNYDFS started the forex investigation, to reject trades thatwere unprofitable to both the bank and customers, the regulatorsaid.
But Barclays did not update one of its trading platforms towork with the revised system, NYDFS said. As a result, 7 percentof Barclays' trading platforms were still filtered by thefeature that checked whether trades were not profitable for thebank until August 2015. Barclays has since updated all tradingplatforms, NYDFS said.
The settlement agreement between NYDFS and Barclays saidthere were numerous instances in which Barclays staff toldemployees what to tell clients and the bank's sales staff whoquestioned why trades were rejected.
Some senior Barclays employees, for example, told tradersand technology staff not to let the sales team know about the"Last Look" feature. "If you get inquiries just obfuscate andstonewall," a Barclays head of automated forex trading wrote in2011, according to the settlement document, which did notidentify the person.
A Barclays sales employee who questioned "Last Look" in 2014was told by another employee that it was in place to "ensureprofitability of a trade for Barclays" but that "Our Teamgeneral does not share this info with the client, and just sayit was a business reject." (Reporting by Suzanne Barlyn; Additional reporting by SteveSlater in London; editing by Paul Simao and Meredith Mazzilli,Grant McCool)