Regulators come down hard on communications compliance lapses (IGNITES)

The SEC and CFTC settled cases with a number of large firms over their employees use of off-channel communications to conduct business. The communications occurred on employees’ personal devices through various messaging platforms such as iMessage, WhatsApp and Signal. FrontLine’s Founder and President Amy Lynch explains that even though firms have invested heavily in technology for surveillance of electronic communications, failures happened from a compliance and supervision perspective. She adds that with several communication methods outside of emailing now readily available, the technology implemented by most firms was not able to capture these other applications. Fines for all the firms totaled almost $550 million with the charges centered on books and records and supervision violations where the firms failed to maintain and preserve communications and conduct regular monitoring. See IGNITES (subscription required), “Wells Fargo, BNP, Others Fined $549M in Messaging Probe”