Wells Fargo & Co. and BNP Paribas SA are among firms that will pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties for employees using unofficial communications like WhatsApp and personal email to conduct business — the latest salvo in U.S. regulators’ crackdown on Wall Street’s failure to keep records, Bloomberg News reported. Wells Fargo units agreed to pay $125 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission and BNP will pay $35 million, the regulator said Tuesday. Meanwhile, the two lenders will pay $75 million each over similar violations by their derivatives brokers, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said. In all, the CFTC announced penalties of $260 million, and the SEC said firms had agreed to pay it $289 million. Total fines for the probes into messaging practices have now crossed $2.5 billion, making it one of the biggest crackdowns on Wall Street of the last decade. What began as a look at trading desks’ use of chat apps has expanded into a look into all of finance’s use of any kind of communication tool that doesn’t save records appropriately. Hedge funds and private equity are also under investigation for their use of personal communication apps.
