The material was produced after an independent enquiry by the Bank of England, where the Director of the SFO, David Green CB QC, has accepted the case for investigation.
Following the news of the investigation, Phil Beckett, Partner at Proven Legal Technologies, which deals in corporate investigation and e-disclosure’s, commented that this is an example of serious employee malpractice that could have been captured by a more thorough and regular analysis of communications.
“Banks in the UK have a history of not providing all the information required by the regulators and there have been a number of recent issues with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) when banks have failed to provide all necessary information,” said Phil.
“But if big organisations are being fined, what skeletons exist in the cupboard for the smaller companies?”
Phil believes that all communications, especially chat and voice data, are going to be crucial to the investigatory process and the ability to analyse that data from the attempted manipulation becomes essential.
“The people involved have probably interacted regularly across internal and external channels, so the potential pool of messages that could contain relevant data can be very large. Analysts therefore need to scour this information carefully and intelligently to find the key messages that relate to the case,” added Phil.
“Until now, audits of company data have primarily been used posthumously as way of finding out ‘what went wrong’. However, prevention is always better than cure, and the financial services sector needs to get much better at using technology to proactively spot problems before they occur if they are to avoid future fines of this kind.”
Leave a comment