A Finextra member 24 August, 2023, 02:07 0 likes

At an unnamed US operation of a foriegn IB, I was going through all billing (I'd been there maybe a year) from Bloomberg, and suddenly realized that I wasn't seeing anything from B Vault.  I checked with another vendor, and learned that the latter made messaging available for downloading and review, but we didn't seem to be doing anything with it.  From BB, we had something setup, but it was all a mystery.  Got into it, and discovered that a few years earlier, it was being setup.  But what I found made it clear that it hadn't been touched since then.  Many current users were not set up, most had no managers set up to review their messaging (the managers actually cared, for the most part, though some didn't, and some didn't want anyone in their 'business')..  Turns out that my then new boss had been in charge of the setup, then apparently walked away from it.  I told him it was a problem, but it was like he was Sgt Schultz in Hogans Heroes - I see nothing, I hear Nothing, I know nothing.  IOTW, don't bother me.  Until his former coworkers in internal audit informed me that they wanted to see where things stood.  Then my boss suddenly got religion.  He was a tiny bit helpful in getting a few bosses to cooperate, not in actually doing things.  A coworker and I basically set it up like new, learned how to administer it, And by the time I had to leave because my job was moving out of my commuting range (I WAS HYBRID, there was no good reason for it) we were mostly up again on BV.  But of course, no one wanted to know about other such exposures.

One sort of related thought; in my first full time Managing Market Data job, the trading floors had lockers for all phones.  But no one used them.  Surprise, surprise.  Compliance in a major bank?  Frequenty a huge, bad joke.