German banking giant Deutsche Bank is banning the use of any mobile phone-based messaging which can’t be monitored by the lender, in a bid to improve compliance efforts.
The new policy was communicated to employees in a memo last Friday, signed by chief operating officer Kim Hammonds and chief regulatory officer, Sylvie Matherat.
"We fully understand that the deactivation will change your day-to-day work and we regret any inconvenience this may cause. However, this step is necessary to ensure Deutsche Bank continues to comply with regulatory and legal requirements," it noted, according to reports.
The move will effectively ban the use of SMS messages and any third party apps including WhatsApp, Google Talk and Apple’s iMessage.
It will apparently apply not only to corporate-owned devices but also personal handsets used by staff in the workplace – although it’s not clear how the latter will be enforced.
The move comes in apparent response to Deutsche Bank’s poor record on regulatory compliance, which has cost the lending giant close to $14 billion in fines since 2008, according to Bloomberg data.
Some of these fines may have been levied in the past as a result of the bank’s failure to produce accurate communications records when asked, it is believed.
UK regulator the FSA apparently requires banks to record and store traders’ call records for six months, for example.
Deutsche Bank staff will now be forced to use the lender’s own in-house systems.
John Safa, founder of messaging platform Pushfor, argued that many third party apps treat security as an afterthought.
“That's counter to what financial institutions need to be compliant. If you're a bank and you're sharing confidential or sensitive information you want to limit where it is seen to authorized people,” he added.
“When you send information outside the corporate network, you lose control of what happens to it. It doesn't matter if it's encrypted in transit; once it's received it can be forwarded, downloaded or shared publicly. The only answer is not to send it in the first place.”
Just last week security fears were raised over the encryption behind WhatsApp which on experts could enable a third party to read ‘secure’ messages.