I got an email from compliance this morning about an email I sent to my personal email address. They claimed it contained "sensitive data" and I was therefore in breach of firm policy.
All it contained was a spreadsheet attached that was a model template I built over time when I had down time on my desk. The formatting is not what my firm uses, the company isn't restricted from coverage due to banking. In fact the only data in the entire thing were the historical numbers I got from the 10-Ks.
I'm not in IB, nor any capacity of research or sell-side activity so I'm not sure what the problem is. I've asked compliance for clarification and received no response. I'm starting to worry this will lead to termination.
The model was purely for practice and built completely from scratch by me.
If anyone has any helpful thoughts on what to do or if you've experienced anything like this before and can share it would be greatly appreciated.
As a general rule, just don't send anything from your work email to your private email unless it's something like plane tickets or anything that is clearly personal in nature. Any email you send with an attachment will be looked at by somebody (most likely somebody who doesn't really understand this stuff), and by sending any type of model or work-related document, you are just asking for a run-in with compliance.
I've seen this lead to termination within ~2hrs of somebody sending an email to themselves. I hope this won't be the case for you, but people need to start taking this shit seriously, as another guy on WSO did something along these lines and got fired just a few weeks ago.
Deleted
Thanks for the insight. We will see what happens I guess. Going forward, lesson learned regardless of the outcome.
One of the analysts from my class was dinged by compliance as well for actually sending work-related docs/spreadsheet to his personal email to work from home. He had a chat with his manager and explained his situation, for compliance reasons, the analyst was mandated to attend a 4 hour compliance seminar and answer a bunch of emails. It was just a hassle imo.
Echoing above, not really worth the risk - at some banks you need explicit permission first from your manager and then compliance signs off on it
I received a response from compliance and they apologized for flagging and removed the "breach of firm policy" from their records upon realizing all the info was public.
Going forward though I feel it's wise to follow everyone's advice and just not send things to my personal account.
Great outcome
Awesome. Glad this didn't get serious.
street smart? not sure if srs.
Miscers on WSO?
Glad to hear you didn't get in trouble. I've done that a few times no biggie.Just don't hit the 'thumbs up' on your firm approved LinkedIn profile; they come down on you like you just tweeted NORAD access codes.
It's normal compliance flagged it - if they did not they would not be doing their job properly. Firms don't just fire without proper cause. Everything you have sent and that got flagged will be properly investigated and a full review will be conducted. In your case it was clearly nothing to do with work, so all OK. You just took some of your co-workers time no biggie. In the future don't send excel spreadsheets to yourself :)
Again I repeat - firms don't randomly fire you. Firing is a big deal and is not done lightly.
you're gonna be on their radar for a bit so make sure your emails and all communications are strictly adhered to thrir stupid little rules.
The thing about IP is that even if you created the model from scratch, but you did it at work and during work hours it is considered to be their IP not yours.
Thanks all! Very helpful for the future.
Compliance...if ever a job function merited a roll eyes emoticon!
Anything completed at work is considered work property, not yours (irrelivant if its your job function or not).
It looks like multiple people here do not understand the true meaning of "getting dinged. " just because someone on the street looks at you funny does not mean they have "dinged" you
Yeah, dinged to me is more like you didn't get the job or they actually fired you.
I worked at a firm earlier in my career that fell under NASD rules (yup, that old before finra existed) and was small. We figured out that the compliance team (3 people) would have to review our emails and call us in with no recourse if we hit key terms that the email bot would flag. So we'd constantly say things like "I guarantee" stupid shit like I'll meet a friend at a bar. Attach pictures of Pac Man PDF pasted into excel. It became a game of who had to see compliance the most. But this was not a BB so the higher ups just thought it was funny to fuck with the compliance folks.
Another thing to be conscious of, is that in your employment contract it will often have an clause or section about your models, books, etc that you do while in the office are their property. So sending those things to yourself could be seen as "stealing" proprietary models that they technically own. I make it a habit to only do side modeling on my personal laptop just so there are never any issues. In general the only "personal" excel files I have ever had on a work computer is a budget model, and some misc. things that wouldn't amount to anything if I didn't have them anymore.
let go due to compliance issue, how should I tell the story in interview? (Originally Posted: 06/25/2013)
Hi, I was recently let go from JPM due to compliance breach (sending too many email to my personal gmail account). While this was the real reason, I got the option to resign voluntarily and maintain a clean paper record.
I am currently taking interviews from other banks, and when I answering why I left JPM, I got the below three options 1. I resign due to personal reason 2. I got fired due to compliance breach 3. I got let go due to redundancy cut
and here are my concerns for each of the options 1. resign due to personal reason - i need to make up a bunch of stories and people will find out the truth from their JPM friends shortly
telling the truth - it rings the bell of compliance breach, and people may not believe it's just a simple reason of sending email to person account.
Redundancy cut - it's between the two options, interviewers may stop drilling down when they hear redundancy cut, as redundancy cut is so normal in the industry. However, it can't rule out the possibility that people still ask around.
Right now, I am thinking of the third options. Can anyone give me more opinions on this issue? Thanks!
Just say you resigned for personal reasons, which is technically true since JPM gave you that option. I actually doubt many of your coworkers and maybe even superiors will know why you were let go unless you went around telling people about it. Mentioning that you were fired for compliance reasons will automatically disqualify you from many jobs.
Thanks. I was thinking about this as well. But I wasn't the only got fired due to this reason, and my co-workers, at least those in my team, seem to know about this already.
Why were you sending so many emails to your personal account? Were you transferring company proprietary files and data to your personal inbox? If that is not the case then you could explain this to JPM and promise not to do it again. Also did they just fire you like that without warning that you were sending too many personal emails?
yes, did they not give you prior warnings? and why the heck were you doing that anyway?
Did this happen last year? HK OFC?
Most cases you are being fired for other reasons but they use a BS reason like this to get you out of the way.
The email issue is definitely not the straw that broke the camels back. You're being let go for other reasons than the email. I've been in your shoes and I got the same line of bs as well. If you're employed at will, must of us are, then they technically don't even have to give you a reason for your dismissal. It sucks to hear, but they are actually being extremely kind to you by giving you those options.
1 - You don't want to fabricate a story. You'll have to keep it up for years and people will find out eventually.
2 - Terrible option. They could possibly disclose your reason for leaving/termination should a future employer ask. Also, being fired for a "compliance breach" is not something you want to have in your past should you want to work for another investment bank as you may have to go through the FINRA registration again at some point.
3 - Definitely the best option. There's a difference between being "let go" and being "fired". This is the easiest to explain and if its on paper with JPM you won't ever have to explain it further.
This is a small hiccup in your career. Don't let it get to you. Happens to the best people all of the time.
Sending out research report vs compliance (Originally Posted: 04/02/2010)
Hi everybody! I've got the following question. I've started working at BB IDB recently and a friend of mine asked me to send him one of reports made by our bank's equity research team. It's a standard research report that doesn't contain any non-public info but it is stored on our closed web site (so it's available only to subscribers). If I send it to him will it be the violation of compliance procedures which can cause me troubles? Or is this such a minor issue that no one will care? Thanks in advance.
This is a really stupid thing to take a risk over. Banks take themselves extremely seriously and if they have decided not to release that sort of information, you'd be taking a unnecessary risk just because your friend has a hard-on for research PDFs. You can get some BB reports anyway through discount brokers.
As written above, little to no win for a massive potential loss.
ive sent research to friends and received it as well.
my firm didnt really care at first and then after awhile when people figured out what was going on, they said not to do it.
that being said..you can always print out a copy and either snail-mail it to your friend or run it through a scanner and then send it from a public email account to your friend. pretty hard for the man to find out.
x
What? People send and recieve research reports constantly. you guys all have access to thomsonONE or TheMarkets.com anyways. An investment banking research department is for use to gain business, they encourage their reports to go out.
There isn't a week that goes by that I don't call an investment banker and ask them to send me research reports (their banks or other banks even) that they have access to that I don't.
You'll be fine. That being said, don't do it again, not bc it violates your firm's compliance policy, but bc it violates the user-agreement to access the research.
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