Banks Tighten Internal Controls on Traders Working Home Office

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In this age of remote work with no forecast to end, the financial sector takes unprecedented measures to watch over bank workers and prevent transgressions.

Bank traders like Barclays are required to ensure that they work in rooms separate from people living in the same house. Morgan Stanley bank staff use laptops where each keystroke is recorded. Banks like NatWest Group require daily location updates from operators and record video calls.

With new lockdowns across Europe this weekend, as Londoners are banned from meeting other families indoors and Parisians are again under curfew, this remote monitoring seems to be here to stay for a long time.

The pandemic has already forced compliance authorities from banks and tradings to ride a steep learning curve since March, when they set up a patchwork of measures for the first shutdowns imposed by governments. Regulators, who at first were forced to relax some monitoring rules to allow operators to work from home, now expect kitchen tables to be closely monitored, just like the trading floors.

“From now on, office and home work arrangements should be similar,” said Julia Hoggett, market supervision director for the UK Financial Conduct Authority, during the City & Financial Global conference this week. “This is not an information market that we want to be arbitrated.”

“The stakes for banks are high. Inside information, manipulation, and misuse of accounts are high risks when traders are alone. After a decade of trying to rebuild confidence lost in market scandals, companies need to show that they have not forgotten their lessons.”

In the five years to September 2017, banks disbursed US$375 billion in conduct fines, according to a report by FMSB industry panel.

Source: Bloomberg