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Comment by Wyoming23 | Hacker News Reader

There wasn't any evidence of any bank actually doing anything wrong though.

This is mostly an outdated and now probably overreaching law, written in 1948 when most conversations happened face to face and written memos were more significant/official. An employee using Whatsapp to ask if someone wants to get a drink after work or talk about last night's basketball game isn't exactly sinister, but the interpretation is that all of that needs to be done on the recorded, audited channels.

They could still just talk face to face if they wanted to coordinate crimes, the SEC isn't making every bank employee wear a microphone yet.

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Regulators and the resulting internal legal & compliance folks sometimes create some really perverse incentives. Mostly they are in the business of telling people what NOT to do. Rarely can you get them to approve in writing a course of action of what TO DO. A lot of "just asking questions" vibes.

I once worked on a phone app which would give internal users the ability to make certain transactions while away from the desk. It was the mobile version of something they had on their work PC.

Compliance's concern was it could be used while overseas where subject to other regulators. It was pointed out to compliance that these same users were using these same phones to make voice calls to execute the same transactions, for decades.

Having to enter the information in electronically rather than over a phone call is demonstrably better from a record keeping & being compliant perspective. It turned into a case of bringing existing practices more "into the light" was actually considered worse than the status quo.

> There wasn't any evidence of any bank actually doing anything wrong though.

There wouldn't be. That's the entire point of using chat.

> They could still just talk face to face if they wanted to coordinate crimes, the SEC isn't making every bank employee wear a microphone yet.

Of course they could. We can at least keep corruption moderately inconvenient.

Why would people risk being out of compliance for no reason?

Given what we know about insider trading on Wall Street (and LIBOR etc), most likely there was a lof of incriminating discussions. And there does seem to be some evidence in the case of Nomura.

https://dealbreaker.com/2022/09/make-sure-to-delete-that-inc...

LOL

"The head of a trading desk routinely directed traders to delete messages on personal devices and to use Signal, including during the CFTC's probe."

1000% this was done in-person, not in any electronic medium Probably by telling his right-hand-man or sub-heads who then distributed the message in-person, non-electronically as well

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