The Financial Times reported on Thursday that Reuters- Morgan Stanley has hit financial penalties on employees using messaging platforms such as WhatsApp and others for official business.
The penalties were between a few thousand dollars and over a million dollars per employee, and were determined based on factors such as the number of messages sent, seniority and whether they had already received warnings, among others.
The lender agreed to pay $200 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2021 to deal with employee communications on messaging platforms that had not been approved by the company.
The SEC and Wall Street require broker-dealers to keep records of all business related communications, and the SEC is looking into whether they have been keeping a track of their employees' digital communications.
In 2020, Morgan Stanley fired two top executives because of the unauthorized use of WhatsApp to discuss work matters.