WASHINGTON — The financial penalty is staggering. JPMorgan Chase & Co. will pay $920 million for trading losses that shook the financial world last year.

But the bigger price may be a few words rarely uttered in settlements with U.S. regulators: The nation’s largest bank is also admitting wrongdoing.

JPMorgan’s acknowledged failure of oversight in the $6 billion trading loss is a first for a major company since the Securities and Exchange Commission reversed its longstanding practice of allowing firms to pay fines without accepting fault.

The admission, made Thursday as part of a broad settlement with U.S. and U.K. regulators, could leave the bank vulnerable to millions of dollars in lawsuits. The legal burden of proof in such private litigation is lower than in cases brought by the government.

“The floodgates are opening,” said Anthony Sabino, an attorney and business professor at St. John’s University in New York. “This is the kind of thing plaintiffs’ lawyers salivate over.”

Regulators said JPMorgan’s weak oversight allowed traders in its London office to assign inflated values to transactions and cover up huge losses as they ballooned. Two of the traders are facing criminal charges of falsifying records to hide the losses.

Combined, the bank will pay one of the largest fines ever levied against a financial institution: $200 million to the SEC, $200 million to the U.S. Federal Reserve, $300 million to the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and $220 million to the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority.

As part of the SEC settlement, JPMorgan acknowledged that it violated securities laws in failing to keep watch over traders.