NEW YORK, Dec 3 (Reuters) - Virtu Financial ( VIRT )

will pay a $2.5 million fine to settle U.S. Securities and

Exchange Commission accusations the large market maker

improperly allowed almost all employees at its broker-dealer

unit access to confidential information about customers and

their trades.

The broker-dealer unit Virtu Americas, which according to

the SEC handled about 25% of market orders from U.S. retail

investors during the relevant period, did not admit or deny

wrongdoing, the SEC said on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge John

Koeltl in Manhattan approved the accord.

In a civil complaint filed in September 2023, the SEC said Virtu

repeatedly told customers that it used "information barriers"

and "systemic separation between business groups" to protect

their material nonpublic information.

The SEC said that was false, because broker-dealer employees

were able from January 2018 to April 2019 to access customers'

names, and the names, prices and volumes of securities that

customers bought and sold, by using a "widely known and

frequently shared generic user name and password."

Virtu, based in Manhattan, had no immediate comment on the

settlement.

It has said it voluntarily disclosed to the SEC in 2019 that

trade data may have been accessible to more employees than

intended, and that it coincided with a migration of a recently

acquired business into a back-office database.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Lincoln

Feast.)