In the finance industry, shadow IT can cost you dearly. JP Morgan has agreed to pay a fine of $ 125 million with the SEC, the American financial markets authority for letting several of its employees use WhatsApp messaging and their personal email addresses to negotiate several official transactions on behalf of the company. If in an average organization, this type of behavior is not particularly problematic, it is different for financial and banking services regulated by the SEC, which are subject to transparency obligations. These companies must in particular be able to transmit to the financial market authority all the messages exchanged by its employees within the framework of a specific transaction.
As part of the deal, JPMorgan admitted that “from January 2018 to at least November 2020, its employees frequently communicated on securities-related business matters on their personal devices, using text messages, WhatsApp and accounts. personal messaging. None of these exchanges have been retained by the company as required by federal law ”
JPMorgan is also targeted by another fine issued by another American financial authority for similar reasons: the CFTC, Commodity Futures Trading Commission has thus imposed a fine of an additional $ 75 million “for failing to maintain, retain and produce items that were required to be kept under the CFTC’s record keeping requirements. In other words, the CFTC also criticizes JPMorgan for letting its employees use Whatsapp and other personal messaging in a professional setting.
In total, the fines against the financial group JPMorgan therefore amount to $ 200 million. In 2020, the company announced the dismissal of one of its traders who had used several third-party messaging applications not controlled by the bank in a professional setting.