NatWest Group staff will no longer be able to use WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Skype on their corporate devices.

NatWest previously asked its employees to only use channels approved by the bank, but it has now made the messaging platforms inaccessible from its work devices.

In a statement, the bank said that the ban had come into effect earlier this month.

“Like many organisations, we only permit the use of approved channels for communicating about business matters, whether internally or externally,” it continued.
The move comes as off-channel communications become a growing concern for businesses.

Messaging channels such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger are encrypted and offer setting changes that allow messages to be deleted or disappear, making recovery difficult and in some cases impossible.

With the ability to delete entire conversations, they make it more challenging to detect wrongdoing within a company.

Financial institutions need to be in line with document retention regulations and have recoverable communications, and in the past they have already found themselves in difficulty in dealing with the situation arising from the use of these messaging services.

inancial institutions including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup have had to pay hefty fines over record-keeping rules in recent years, with the BBC reporting a total of more than $2.8 billion in fines filed against US banks over the period.

In the UK, energy regulator Ofgem fined Morgan Stanley £5.41 million for failing to record and retain electronic trading communications made via WhatsApp on privately-owned phones, with the breach occurring between January 2018 and March 2020.

Morgan Stanley said the firm has taken measures to prevent future breaches with a range of initiatives including staff training and enhanced internal controls.

In August, the Financial Conduct Authority said it was considering an investigation into how banks are using encrypted messaging for work communications, putting UK firms under increased scrutiny.

The issue not only regards the business world, but politics and the public sector as well. The UK Covid inquiry revealed ministers, including former prime minister Boris Johnson, have used WhatsApp for government business in recent years and deleted work-related communications exchanged during the pandemic.

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