TD’s Work Monitoring Plan Shows the New Pressure Inside Bank Compliance Teams

Toronto-Dominion Bank has told some employees in its financial crimes and risk management team that it will use WorkiQ software to monitor work activity, including time spent on browsers, internal chat tools and meeting applications. The bank told Reuters that the system is not artificial intelligence and described it as a standard industry practice meant to improve workflow visibility, team capacity planning and performance management. TD also said employees are informed when such tools are used and that safeguards are in place to protect privacy. Still, the rollout immediately raised questions among staff about consent, data use and whether the tool could eventually influence performance evaluations.

The timing makes the move especially sensitive. TD has been under major regulatory pressure since its U.S. anti-money laundering failures led to more than $3 billion in penalties and a guilty plea in 2024. U.S. authorities said the bank had allowed large portions of transaction activity to go unmonitored, creating serious gaps in its financial-crime controls. Against that background, TD’s desire to better understand how compliance and risk teams spend time is understandable from a management perspective. The bank needs to show regulators, investors and internal stakeholders that it is strengthening oversight, reducing manual inefficiencies and improving operational discipline.

The problem is that productivity monitoring can easily damage employee trust if the purpose is not clearly communicated. Reuters reported that TD staff asked whether they would be asked for consent, how the data would be used and whether internet activity during lunch would be captured. A TD executive said the software would not listen to conversations during meetings and would capture that an employee was using Excel without tracking what was inside the spreadsheet. That distinction matters because the difference between workflow analytics and employee surveillance depends heavily on the level of detail collected, who can access the information and whether the data is used to support employees or pressure them.

This is part of a broader post-pandemic workplace shift. Hybrid work has pushed banks, technology companies and large employers to seek more transparency over how work gets done outside traditional office settings. At the same time, employees have become more alert to monitoring tools that track applications, websites, keystrokes or time away from the screen. In Canada, privacy authorities have warned that employee monitoring must be reasonable, transparent and tied to legitimate business purposes. Ontario also requires larger employers to have written electronic monitoring policies. For a bank like TD, legal compliance is only one issue; reputational risk and employee morale are just as important.

For investors, the development should be read as both a compliance signal and a culture signal. On one hand, TD is trying to rebuild control systems after one of the most damaging regulatory failures in Canadian banking history. Better workflow data could help identify bottlenecks, justify staffing needs and reduce manual processes in high-risk functions. On the other hand, if employees view the system as surveillance rather than support, it could worsen morale inside teams already under heavy pressure. The financial value of monitoring tools will depend not just on what data they collect, but on whether TD can use that data to fix processes rather than simply measure people.