Federal regulators continued their crackdown in opposition to workers of Wall Avenue corporations utilizing personal messaging apps to speak, with 11 brokerage corporations and funding advisers agreeing Tuesday to pay $549 million in fines.

Wells Fargo, BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Financial institution of Montreal had been hit with the largest penalties by the Securities and Trade Fee and the Commodity Futures Buying and selling Fee. Collectively, the brokerage and funding advisory arms of these 4 monetary establishments accounted for practically 90 % of the fines, in response to statements launched by the regulators.

The most recent spherical of fines provides to the practically $2 billion in penalties in opposition to huge Wall Avenue banks introduced final 12 months for related violations. In all, the regulators have now penalized greater than two dozen banks and funding corporations for not correctly policing workers use of “off channel” messaging companies like WhatsApp, iMessage and Sign.

The S.E.C. charged the monetary establishments for failing to correctly “keep and protect” all official communications by their workers. Federal securities legal guidelines require banks and investments corporations to keep up information and ensure their workers usually are not conducting firm enterprise utilizing unauthorized technique of communication.

The usage of personal message companies flourished through the pandemic, when many financial institution workers had been working from house. The S.E.C. has mentioned banks and funding corporations ought to have taken extra steps to make sure that workers weren’t misusing personal messaging companies to conduct enterprise.

The S.E.C. has mentioned that use of off-channel communications might stymie investigations as a result of a scarcity of record-keeping of these communications might obscure potential wrongdoing.

“File-keeping failures comparable to these right here undermine our capacity to train efficient regulatory oversight, typically on the expense of traders,” Sanjay Wadhwa, the S.E.C.’s deputy director of enforcement, mentioned in an announcement. “Registrants that fail to adjust to these core regulatory obligations accomplish that at their very own peril,” mentioned Ian McGinley, the C.F.T.C.’s enforcement director.

The S.E.C. mentioned in its assertion that every one the corporations had admitted “their conduct violated record-keeping provisions of the federal securities legal guidelines” and have begun placing in tempo compliance insurance policies to police off-channel communications by workers.