Five banks have agreed to pay a total of about $3.3 billion to US, British and Swiss regulators to resolve allegations that they tried to manipulate the vast foreign-exchange market.

The settlements resolve long-running investigations by the UK's Financial Conduct Authority, the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Switzerland's Finma. They indicate that the banks, in some cases as recently as last year, were engaged in activities designed to move one of the world's largest and most interconnected markets to benefit their own trading positions, sometimes at the expense of their clients.