Toronto-Dominion Bank has told some anti-financial-crime and risk-management employees it will use software to monitor their work, prompting privacy and consent concerns, according to Reuters. 

The program will measure the time staff spend in web browsers and in internal chat and meeting tools, the news agency said, citing a recording of a team call and a document the bank shared with employees.

TD defended the rollout in a statement to Reuters, calling it “standard practice across the industry.” The bank said it uses automated tools to sharpen insights and allocate resources more effectively, that the software is not artificial intelligence and is not tied to any specific business line or matter, and that it helps managers oversee workflows, capacity, and performance. Colleagues are told where the tools are used and why, TD said, adding that it has safeguards to protect their privacy.

The software, called WorkiQ, is made by ActiveOps, which markets it as a tool for “employee and wellbeing intelligence,” according to the report.  On a call Thursday, Deanna Pacitti, TD’s associate vice president of high-risk investigations, told her team the tool would surface “pain points” and show where the group spends too much time across the bank’s system. 

In an undated internal FAQ document shared with Reuters, TD said WorkiQ would help managers recover transparency lost to remote work. The document took up questions such as whether employees could use the internet during their lunch hour and how much of their day should be accounted for. The bank said there is an acceptable amount of unaccounted-for time and that it is still working out those expectations.

Pacitti said the software runs in the background and had gone through a privacy review, according to the report. 

Responding to employee questions, Pacitti said the tool would not listen in on conversations during meetings but would indicate whether a worker was active, which she later clarified meant being in a meeting, according to Reuters. She said the software could register that an employee was working in Excel without capturing what they were doing in the spreadsheet.

TD has built up its financial crimes and compliance operations in recent years after paying a record U.S. fine for money-laundering failures, the largest such penalty paid by a major bank in Canada. Most of the bank’s staff have worked a hybrid schedule since the pandemic, the news outlet noted.