Morning Coffee: Morgan Stanley bankers live in fear of the text message cops. The new franchises that are hiring in Asia

efinancialcareers.com:

According to people speaking off the record to the New York Post, Morgan Stanley bankers’ biggest wish for the New Year isn’t for a bull market, a revival of SPACs or even a tiny bit of good news about their Elon Musk loan exposure.  They are hoping that when Ted Pick takes over as CEO, he will end the reign of terror over WhatsApp messages.

It’s been known since the start of the year that MS has had a policy of trying to recoup as much as it can of the $200m SEC fine that was levied on it, by surcharging bankers who created the errant messages. (This is one of the unusual cases of wrongdoing where the crime and its evidence are the same thing).  Apparently, however, the ill-will has been building all year as MS bankers feel that they are being treated unduly harshly.

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Some bankers claim that they’ve been called in to “have a talk with legal” for simply responding to a happy hour message, or for answering the phone when their boss called.  They also claim that they hadn’t been given enough training about the blurred lines between business-related communication and purely social or private conversations with clients or workmates.

Excuses of this sort shouldn’t necessarily be taken at face value – Morgan Stanley had a quite detailed “consequences management framework” relating the size of the penalty to the seriousness of the breach, the seniority of the offender and the number of previous warnings and penalties.  If that framework was properly executed, the vast majority of fines will have landed on people who should have known better and more or less deserved it.  It’s noticeable that so far, everyone who has received what they considered to be an unfair punishment has