Morning Coffee: HSBC people reduced to actually calling clients, colleagues. The super hedge fund job that takes less than a minute to apply for

efinancialcareers.com:

Notoriously, millennials hate talking on the phone; they’d much rather text, WhatsApp or SnapChat.  Unfortunately, banks have been hit by so many regulatory fines that they’re no longer in a mood to indulge this taste, and HSBC has now taken it to the logical conclusion – work phones will from now on have the SMS facility turned off.

HSBC's people have apparently already had WhatsApp uninstalled, and presumably Signal, Telegram, Threema and other secret messaging apps are right out.  What are they going to do – leave voicemails, like a Boomer or Lloyd Blankfein?

Presumably, the answer to this is a combination of “yes” and “use email, Bloomberg Chat if you’re senior enough to have it, or whatever other centrally managed solution will allow us to maintain regulatory records”.  Some employees are apparently still going to be allowed to use text messages where the activity is archived, presumably in markets where SMS is really vital.

But what about the poor clients?  It’s been noted a few times since the messaging scandals broke up that the definition of “work related communications” is really broad and doesn’t make much sense.  HSBC bankers now have no way to tell a client that they’re running ten minutes late and ask what coffee they’d like which doesn’t involve that client picking up the phone, interrupting whatever else they were doing and listening to a message for thirty seconds.  Bank of America has a similar policy; soon it’s more likely than not that it will be ubiquitous across the industry.

This is going to get really annoying for the clients.  Many investors have already redirected their landlines and set their voicemails to auto-delete as far back as the 00s, because the volume of sell-side messages had got