Morgan Stanley passes on million-dollar fine to employees

Investment bank Morgan Stanley was fined millions last year for using messenger apps for official communications. Now it has been revealed that the bank is passing the fine on to its employees.

Fine of 200 million dollars for Morgan Stanley

In the US, banks are required to securely archive all their communications. This is not possible with traditional messenger apps, where messages can simply be deleted. For this reason, bank employees are prohibited from using WhatsApp and the like for business purposes. However, numerous banks in the USA have not implemented these requirements – including Morgan Stanley. The responsible supervisory authority therefore imposed numerous high penalties on various financial institutions last year. Morgan Stanley was fined 200 million US dollars. In total, the fines handed out in the banking sector amount to more than USD 1.8 billion. Other prominent banks that had to pay fines include Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.

Employees to pay penalty

Morgan Stanley has now decided to pass on the imposed penalty directly to its employees, according to media reports. According to reports, the bank has developed a point system for this purpose, which will be used to calculate the penalty to be paid in each case. The system takes into account factors such as the number of messages sent via Messenger, the length of service and the number of warnings already issued. The fines calculated in this way are expected to range from a few thousand to more than one million US dollars. Senior executives of the bank are also affected.

The fact that Morgan Stanley takes the requirements of the US Securities and Exchange Commission extremely seriously was already evident in 2020. At that time, the bank dismissed two employees who had communicated via WhatsApp. Although there was no further misconduct, the dismissals were upheld.