TD to monitor some staff with workplace software, reigniting privacy debate in banking

Canada's Toronto-Dominion Bank has informed a group of its employees that their workdays will soon be measured by tracking software, a productivity push that has revived an uncomfortable conversation across banking about how closely employers should watch their staff. The disclosure, first reported by Reuters on the basis of an internal call recording and accompanying documents, centres on workers in the lender's financial-crime and risk-management unit.

At the heart of the plan is a product called WorkiQ, built by the firm ActiveOps, which the bank intends to run quietly in the background to log how long staff spend in their web browsers, messaging tools and video-meeting software. TD has been at pains to define the system's limits: executives told the affected team it carries no artificial-intelligence component, does not eavesdrop on meeting audio, and stops short of recording what people actually do inside individual programs, registering only whether an application is open and whether someone is present on a call. The bank also says the rollout passed an internal privacy assessment.

The reaction from staff was wary. On the call, employees wanted to know exactly what would be captured, whether their agreement would be sought, and, most pointedly, whether the readouts might later feed into performance reviews. Roughly 90 to 100 people are said to have dialled in. One worker argued the effort would be better aimed at stripping out the heavy manual tasks clogging the team's day rather than clocking how time is spent, a frustration the executive leading the call appeared to share. A separate question-and-answer sheet circulated to employees tried to pre-empt the obvious worries, addressing whether lunchtime browsing was acceptable and how much of a day needs to show measurable activity; the bank conceded that a degree of untracked time is fine and that it had not yet settled on firm benchmarks.

TD's pitch is that the tool restores a line of sight into daily work that managers lost once hybrid and home working became entrenched, and it casts such monitoring as commonplace among large employers. It stresses that workers are notified when the software goes live and that protections are in place to guard their privacy. How many people will ultimately fall under the program, and whether it reaches beyond Canada, was not spelled out.

What gives the move added weight is where it is being applied. TD has poured resources into its compliance and financial-crime functions since absorbing a record penalty in the United States over failures in its anti-money-laundering controls. Putting hard numbers on the output of these teams can be read partly as a signal to regulators that the bank is squeezing maximum effectiveness from its defences, even as it stirs delicate questions in a division where confidentiality and data handling are already fraught.

The episode is far from isolated. As flexible working loosened traditional oversight, more companies have reached for digital tracking, and the pushback has been a recurring feature. A large US bank recently began logging the hours of its junior dealmakers under the banner of staff welfare, while a major technology group retreated from a scheme to harvest granular employee input data after internal objections. TD's version, landing inside a heavily policed back-office operation, looks set to become another test case for how much surveillance workforces are prepared to accept.