Every bank I’ve worked at issued a company cell phone. To be pedantic if you say call my personal cell, then compliance will be on you like flies on poop
If you are allowed to be off the record only in person, this seems like the perfect commercial real estate subsidy program from the federal government.
The penalties are so stiff for a lot of infractions, there is far less attempts to workaround the letter of the rules than you would immediately expect.
There's also classes of in-person meetings with externals that you need pre-approval permission to attend and to write up what was discussed after the fact.
Like people at asset management firms attending a dinner with a broker.
Another example, at a hedge fund I worked, emails, meetings or phone calls to public companies required pre-approval from compliance, and for them to be on the email or call. The emails would also require a preface reminding the moron on the other side that you are a hedge fund and they should not provide you with any material non-public info.
It wasn’t about regulation, but protectionism. If you want to do business with us, you need to hire people to deal with us - people we approve of, or no access.
This was in an unregulated industry, with strong protectionist instincts (Hollywoods movie industry).
Couldn’t these sorts of “in person only” rules also be a protectionist gatekeeping technique?
Which gives you an idea of the level of monitoring they are doing to tie that together probably automatically given how quickly I was called. And this was almost 10 years ago.
I'm also old enough to recall the little background hum & beep the bank landlines used to make when you were on a recorded line.