TD Bank to track employees’ work time with monitoring software

Workplace surveillance in highly regulated finance is moving deeper into the compliance function. Toronto-Dominion Bank told some employees in its financial crimes and risk management team that it will use software to track how they work, including time spent on browsers and internal chat and meeting applications.

The rollout puts anti-money-laundering and risk staff at the center of a broader shift in office monitoring, where companies say they need better visibility into workflows while workers see a line blurring between oversight and productivity policing. TD described the deployment as standard practice across the industry, but the move lands in a sensitive part of the bank’s operations rather than in a broad companywide program.

The tool TD identified is WorkiQ, a product from ActiveOps. ActiveOps says WorkiQ is a near real-time monitoring and reporting system that shows how employees use computer systems, including desktop and laptop applications, browser-based applications and Citrix. That makes the software more than a basic time tracker: it is designed to capture detailed activity across work platforms and turn that into management data.

For banks, that kind of monitoring is especially attractive in units tied to financial crime and risk, where managers are under pressure to show control over compliance, staffing and output. But the same features that make the software useful to management also make it contentious for employees, because logging app use can shape how staff decide what to prioritize, how long to spend on a task and whether every click may be measured against performance targets.

Canadian privacy guidance adds another layer of scrutiny. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada says employers should limit collection to what is necessary, generally obtain meaningful consent unless an exception applies, and maintain a clear policy on the collection, use and disclosure of employee personal information when monitoring workplace activity. Ontario has separately required many employers to maintain a written electronic-monitoring policy since April 11, 2022, with firms that had 25 or more employees on January 1, 2022 given until October 11, 2022 to comply.

That regulatory backdrop makes TD’s move more than an internal software decision. It is another sign that, in Canada and beyond, white-collar monitoring is expanding first in the places where compliance pressure is highest, and the debate over how much visibility employers can demand is becoming part of the job itself.