Privacy and freedom in investment banking? Choose another career

When I read that PwC UK was stepping up its monitoring of staff attendance, checking key card swipes and wifi logins, I couldn’t help but laugh.

As the Financial Times reported in August, the professional services firm has been urging staff to work in the office or at a client’s premises for at least three days a week, and is now using electronic surveillance to check up. Many staff had raised concerns about the monitoring.

To anyone outside finance, this might look like a shocking, heavy-handed reaction to remote working culture.

But if you’ve spent any time in investment banking, you know it’s nothing new. For as long as I can remember, Big Brother surveillance has always been part of the job.

I’ve lived through it for the entirety of my career. The key card gave you away. With every swipe, you were disclosing when you arrived, when you left, when you changed floors, and whether your movements made sense in the context of what you claimed to be doing.

Long before Covid-19, long before anyone had ever heard of Zoom, banks had built systems to track not only where we were but what we were doing.

You didn’t question why you were being surveilled; you just regarded it as an unavoidable fact of life.

One highly publicised episode still sticks in my mind. About a decade ago, several banks suddenly cracked down on food deliveries. Juniors were exploiting the meal allowance by ordering dinner to the office and then taking it straight home.

It was a classic bit of ingenuity: work late enough to qualify for the free food, call Seamless or Deliveroo, then head out the door with the sushi or curry. It may not sound like the crime of the century, but it was a misuse of resources — the bank’s, or worse, the client’s — and it had a strong whiff of dishonesty.

What the juniors didn’t realise was that their key card data was giving them away. The compliance team could see that the meal had arrived at the office, but the banker had left within minutes.

Investigations followed, people were disciplined pour encourager les autres, and suddenly delivery receipts were being scrutinised with forensic attention.

No one grassed anyone up. The electronic data told the whole story.

Episodes like that reveal the real bargain in finance. As an investment banker, you’re rewarded handsomely and given a veneer of autonomy, but only on the condition that you stay visible.

This applies to senior bankers too. Managing directors are constantly on the move, travelling around the world to pitch clients and investors. On paper they have enormous freedom.

But even they are not beyond suspicion. If an MD isn’t at a documented client meeting, the question will quietly be asked: where have they really been? Off having a jolly?

And if they have fallen out of favour with senior management, you can be sure someone will start looking at the data. The key card and system login records serve as brutally honest witnesses, stripping away any plausible deniability.

The scrutiny doesn’t stop at the office door. Every banker is obliged to declare their personal brokerage accounts and every single trade is automatically flagged to compliance.

In fact, we were limited to which brokers we could use — they had to be one of the firms electronically synched up with the compliance oversight systems. Bankers had to close down other accounts they maintained, even with well established, properly regulated outfits.

I remember the feeling of filling out those declarations, knowing that whatever you did, however small, would be checked. Buying or selling a single share without permission is enough to cost you your job.

And I get it: banks want to close down risks of potential conflicts of interest or insider trading before they could ever happen.

Still, I found it personally intrusive at the time, and it grated on me that we were being held to a much higher standard than Congresspeople or MPs. That said, I accepted it as part of the deal.

What has changed with the pandemic isn’t so much the principle of oversight, but rather its methods and effectiveness. When everyone dispersed to home offices and kitchen tables in March 2020, the carefully calibrated surveillance systems of the 2010s began to falter.

Suddenly compliance teams were flying blind. They could still see your emails, your logins, your trades, but they had lost the subtle contextual clues of office life. They couldn’t see whether you were glued to your desk or ducking out early. They couldn’t tell if you were genuinely working on a pitchbook or just logged in while doing something else entirely. For a culture built on verification, that lack of visibility was deeply unsettling.

So now, when firms push people back into the office and talk about collaboration, culture or mentoring, I take it with several pinches of rock salt. Those things matter, of course, but there’s another, less glamorous motivation at play.

Banks want to — if I may borrow the 2016 Brexit campaign’s slogan — ‘take back control’. It’s far easier to monitor for market abuse, protect sensitive information and maintain a culture of compliance when everyone is physically present in a controlled environment.

The key card swipe symbolises this reassertion of control by the Deep State of senior management.

For me, this is the trade-off in investment banking. The compensation was always high and the work could be exhilarating, but it came at the cost of sacrificing a degree of privacy most other professions would never accept.

The return-to-office push, backed by card swipes and wifi connections, is really just the old operating system booting back up.