Citadel Might Fight for Its Texts

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has a rule that, if you work in the financial industry, you are only allowed to communicate about work with your colleagues and customers using systems — like your firm email account or Bloomberg messaging — that your firm can archive and review. You are not allowed to use WhatsApp or Signal or iMessage or text messaging from your personal phone. Financial industry employees have to “conduct their communications about business matters within only official channels, and they must maintain and preserve those communications,” as SEC Chair Gary Gensler put it last year, when he fined 15 banks a total of $1.1 billion for using WhatsApp.

This is a weird rule that the SEC has. For one thing, it is obviously not the rule. Gensler cannot possibly have meant that investment bankers and traders are only allowed to communicate about business using corporate email and Bloomberg messages and recorded phone lines; he is surely aware that sometimes a banker will turn to the colleague sitting next to her and say, aloud, “hey did you finish that pitch deck yet,” and that she will sometimes fly out to meet with a client in a conference room (or on a golf course) and talk business face to face. Plenty of business communication still occurs informally, in person, and it can’t be preserved until you get every employee into augmented reality goggles that record everything.