JPMorgan faces regulatory requests over message preservation

(BLOOMBERG) – JPMorgan Chase & Co, which rattled employees earlier this year by ordering them to save work-related messages on their personal phones, said regulators have been asking questions about how it preserves records.

The largest US bank has been responding to requests for information “concerning its compliance with records preservation requirements in connection with business communications sent over electronic messaging channels that have not been approved by the firm,” JPMorgan said in a regulatory filing Monday. The company is engaged in “certain resolution discussions”, but there’s no guarantee that the talks will result in a resolution, according to the filing.

JPMorgan declined to comment beyond the filing.

As Wall Street sent most employees to work from home at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, the question emerged of how securities firms would maintain their tight grip on employee communications as required by regulators – even prompting an industry-wide alert from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s inspections unit.

Earlier this year, JPMorgan ordered traders, bankers, financial advisers and even some branch employees to sift through years of messages on personal devices and set aside any related to work, Bloomberg reported in June.

One notice instructed recipients to root through standard messages as well as platforms such as WeChat and WhatsApp, back to the start of 2018, and save those related to work until the company’s legal department tells them otherwise. Failure to comply could lead to “consequences” for violating the company’s code of conduct, according to the notice seen by Bloomberg in June.