Slack Is Getting Ready for Wall Street. But Is Wall Street Ready for Slack?

Imagine there's another financial scandal and digital communications between co-workers once again become courtroom evidence. In the era of office chatroom services such as Slack and Hipchat, the evidence will read a little differently than the usual e-mails. A running group chat that concerns federal prosecutors will almost inevitably be interlaced with links to a random click-bait quiz—Do you belong in NY or SF?—followed by scattered arguments between colleagues about the relative merits of bagels and burritos. Try to imagine stern attorneys puzzling over transcripts that descend into a stream of sarcastic animations made by Slack's built-in GIF generator. Will the judge be ready to rule about chatroom memes?

At Robinhood, a startup that makes a stock-trading app and is a registered broker dealer, carefully preserving dumb GIFs is the law. Unlike the typical Slack client from the freer-wheeling precincts of tech and online media, Robinhood, in Palo Alto, Calif., is subject to stringent financial industry regulations. Compliance means that all digital communications among employees—including office humor from within Robinhood's Slack chatrooms—must be recorded, archived, and available for parsing by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority or the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.