Just weeks after deciding that its employees should be allowed to communicate with their customers over the WhatsApp messaging application, Deutsche Bank has announced that it would be monitoring some of those conversations. To do so, the German banking giant will be using a system developed by Symphony, a communications provider for banks. This would allow employees to “communicate with clients anytime, anywhere via their preferred chat platform.” DB has decided that the Covid-19 pandemic had made it imperative for banks to stay in close contact with clients in order to be able to provide advice and expertise. Symphony’s system modifies the WhatsApp on its platform and records conversations held on it to allow compliance teams to analyze exchanges. It’s not unusual for financial institutions to subject their front-line employees communications with clients to monitoring. The version of WhatsApp that will be used by employees had to be modified because the app employs end-to-end encryption that makes monitoring difficult.
