Earlier this month Deutsche Bank became the centre of a media furore over the treatment of its 18,000 global equities trading employees facing redundancy.
The bank garnered much criticism for not only informing employees that they were being made redundant on a Sunday night, but for cancelling employee passes and refusing access to the building on the following Monday.
Now, it has been revealed that many of the employees that were made redundant a few weeks ago have maintained access to the company’s internal email system for a number of weeks after leaving Deutsche Bank – potentially compromising GDPR legislation and leaving both employee and customer information at risk.
Bloomberg reported that the bank has reviewed almost all of the communication and found no evidence of “price-sensitive information being communicated or of any other wrongdoing,” a Spokesman for the lender in Frankfurt said in a statement. Access to trading systems was immediately turned off when the employees were let go, he explained.
“A small number of employees continued to have access to their work emails through personal devices for a limited period of time,” he said. “Access to work emails has now been fully revoked.”
However, this incident isn’t the first time that Deutsche Bank has been accused of mismanaging its controls and computer systems. In previous years, these systems have been blamed for misconduct that resulted in fines totalling multiple billions of dollars due to massive growth and a lack of internal communication.
Deutsche Bank confirmed that current Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Christian Sewing is currently investing around £3.7billion on research and development into the issue with views on further securing the entire system.
Whilst multiple thousands of employees have been made redundant by the company, the Financial Times puts the number of employees that retained access to the internal systems at around 50 – adding that one equity salesperson was able to send around 450 emails via remote access after being dismissed from the company.
