TD Bank to monitor financial crimes staff with software

Toronto-Dominion Bank has told some employees in its financial crimes and risk management team that it will use software to track their work, a move that puts one of Canada’s biggest banks at the center of a wider debate over workplace surveillance. The program will monitor the time staff spend on browsers and internal chat and meeting applications, concentrating scrutiny on employees whose jobs already sit close to the bank’s compliance and regulatory obligations.

TD said the tool is not artificial intelligence and is meant to help managers better manage workflows, team capacity and performance. The bank also said employees are informed where the tools are used and for what purpose, and that privacy safeguards are in place. Deanna Pacitti, TD’s associate vice president of high-risk investigations, said the system runs in the background, went through privacy review, will not listen to conversations in meetings, and will not track what employees do inside Excel, only that they are using the application.

The rollout reflects a broader recalibration in white-collar finance, where banks are using more digital monitoring to measure productivity in hybrid and remote environments. Most TD employees have worked in a hybrid model since the pandemic, which makes browser, chat and meeting tracking far more visible to staff than in a traditional office setting. The software TD is using comes from ActiveOps, whose WorkiQ product is marketed for banking and other service operations as a way to provide real-time insight into team activity, work patterns, productivity and utilization.

The timing matters because TD remains under intense pressure to strengthen its financial-crimes controls. On October 10, 2024, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network assessed a record $1.3 billion penalty against TD Bank for Bank Secrecy Act violations, the largest penalty against a depository institution in U.S. Treasury and FinCEN history. FinCEN also imposed a four-year independent monitorship after saying TD’s anti-money-laundering program had languished for more than a decade and that backlogs of suspicious activity had been allowed to persist.

In Canada, the privacy question is not only cultural but legal. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada says people have a right to privacy at work, that banks are covered by PIPEDA, and that employee personal information can include web-browsing, email and keystroke records. The commissioner says employers should limit collection to what is necessary and generally need meaningful consent or transparent notice, a standard that will shape how far TD can push monitoring before the line between oversight and intrusion starts to blur.