MONITORING REMOTE WORK IN THE CORONAVIRUS ERA The majority of your employees are now (likely) working from home. Do you know what equipment they’re using? When’s the last time that you audited their laptops and phones to ensure that their eComms, virus protection (no pun intended) and applications were compliant with corporate policies?
Volatile Markets are Busy Times For many investors, volatile markets signal that it’s time to act. The world is currently hopeful that this pandemic will ease up once the summer starts. And, as is the case for every US election year, the instability of the markets in the months before the vote is typically replaced with a vigorous rally once a new President is selected. This suggests that there will be a flurry of activity and an increased number of trades to monitor. The market’s expected volatility makes it extremely difficult to spot unusual, or out of the ordinary behaviors. For example,
Are you ready for work-from-home? Thousands of businesses have been caught off-guard, scrambling to hastily scrape together contingency plans in the event that their employees need to work from home. Beyond the obvious issues related to maintaining the supply chain and staffing required to support critical industries and floating catastrophe pay arrangements to sustain staff, hourly workers, in particular, business leaders have been grappling with the reality of eComms. How can you monitor what you don’t have access to? Moreover, are the solutions that your employees using consistent and compliant with the federal regulations that your firm is legally required to adhere to? For example, with Zoom, a popular free and fee-based video conferencing solution, the call host can monitor the onscreen activity of all participants dialed into the call.
“ALL” during the call are automatically sent to the host as a .txt file and it’s not clear what happens to the private SMS text chats that are posted 1:1 or 1:few participants on the call. Does your data storage and privacy policy cover these features? Even more troubling is that Zoom does not define how it uses personal information. Mashable went so far as to call Zoom a “work-from-home disaster.” Many businesses have not yet drafted policies that meet current applications of technology and eComms, let alone established strict protocols governing monitoring and surveillance in the event of a global crisis. Few could have predicted the scourge that is plaguing the planet today. Large banks and other enterprise financial institutions generally require the use of mobile technology and laptops provided by and approved by the firm. But those still cannot monitor employees that are no longer sharing an office with colleagues and are now sharing trading ideas, actions, and tips on the less monitored channels.
How to Develop a Contingency Plan as a Financial Institution New targets As it is the case for nearly everything, you simply don’t know what you don’t know… until you know that you don’t know it. That’s a rather convoluted way of stating that, because you can’t be ready for everything, you need to conduct a scenario planning exercise then establish a contingency plan for as many scenarios as possible. But where do you begin?
These are challenging times. It’s unclear how long it will take for financial institutions to reign in all eComms, trades and other business functions for appropriate surveillance operations. However, a systematic approach to defining your firm’s business practices and the technologies used to enable those practices can help you navigate this ongoing market storm and prepare you for the future of work which is increasingly tilted to working-from-home.
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