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Several US financial firms, including multiple Wells Fargo companies, will pay a combined<\/a> $549 million in fines after admitting they couldn\u2019t produce discussions about company business from smartphone messaging apps<\/a> used by their employees, \u201cincluding those at senior levels.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) fined banks for being unable to produce discussions going back to at least 2019. The regulators say employees used their personal devices to discuss official company business via apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal and that those \u201coff-channel communications\u201d weren\u2019t \u201cmaintained or preserved.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Not keeping records of those conversations violates the 1934 Securities Exchange Act\u2019s recordkeeping rules, as well as similar rules from the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, according to the SEC. The CFTC maintains its own recordkeeping requirements, which it says were violated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The biggest chunk of the fines go to the Wells Fargo companies, which together will pay almost half of the SEC\u2019s penalties at $125 million, along with another $75 million settlement with the CFTC.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHere are three takeaways for those firms who haven\u2019t yet done so: self-report, cooperate and remediate,\u201d said SEC enforcement director Gurbir S. Grewal. \u201cIf you adopt that playbook, you\u2019ll have a better outcome than if you wait for us to come calling.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n