Employer (bank) restricting the use of other brokers

[Helix]

@Slutmachine

This is a FINMA requirement

As far as I know, it is not. The FINMA states in “Circular 2013/8 Market conduct rules”

D. Surveillance of employee transactions

53 Supervised institutions must take measures for the surveillance of employee transactions. These measures must in particular be capable of preventing employees from misusing insider information in transactions for their own account and of identifying such misuse. Due attention must be paid to all custody accounts and related cash accounts held by employees with the supervised institution or a third-party institution as well as those for which employees have beneficial ownership or power of attorney.

54 For the purpose of these rules, employees are defined as all members of the supervised institution’s staff, together with the members of governing bodies responsible for directing, supervising and controlling, the executive management, partners with unlimited liability and anyone with a comparable function.

55 Supervised institutions must set out their appropriate and suitable surveillance measures in an internal directive. Different levels of surveillance may be applied to different categories of employees or functions in line with the risk of misuse of insider information. Regardless of such risk categories, supervised institutions must ensure that they can access information on all relevant cash and custody accounts whenever necessary.

There is no requirement for custody. Especially, since the board is often exempt from the made up custody requirements (because they would bolt rather than suffer such rules).

Also compare for the conflict of such internal regulations with Art. 323b Abs. 3 OR also known as “Truckverbot” (ban on truck systems) which voids agreements that use salaries to the benefit of the employer. See my post:

Legality of requiring employees to use employing company's banking services

Many swiss banks have started to require that all employees use the company’s banking services exclusively. There seem to be some people interested in discussing the legality and consequences thereof. Reminder: Please do not discuss illegal practices. They are not welcome in this forum. The employers often point to FINMA regulations. But to my knowledge FINMA only requires that banks take steps to prevent insider trading. The implemented compliance solution is their own. The legality of requi…

[Helix]

@Wolverine

I may be a dying breed but when I sign a contract, I consider myself bound by what is in the contract. Company regulations are part of the agreement.

If they feel safe on the moral grounds, they should feel confident with self declaration.

Well, not all contracts are legal. The power asymmetry between a bank and a low level employee is striking and this kind of agreement is potentially void. The one in the wrong is not the one breaking the clause, but the one trying to make it a clause in the first place. These are our laws.

That this has not reached the federal high court is probably due to both parties having no interest to escalate the matter. Banks risk expensive new compliance, small employees risk expensive court cases.

[Akia]

@Wolverine

I may be a dying breed but when I sign a contract, I consider myself bound by what is in the contract. Company regulations are part of the agreement.

This is not the “Lehrbuch”/academic stance on contracts. In general the approach to follow is: Are the consequences of breaking the contract favorable to keeping it going? If yes, there is - both legally, morally and economically - no obligation to keep a contract. Companies do this as well - it’s just how life works man - I don’t like it either, but since we don’t have the concept of “penal damage payments” (Strafschadensersatz) - which we should imho - it’s not always lucrative to break a contract.

Note: This doesn’t apply to criminal activity, aka fraud - so don’t be stupid and commit crimes, that’d indeed be illegal.

[Butch]

@Akia

no obligation to keep a contract.

Not a lawyer, but it would seem to me that it would require BOTH parties to agree to this rather than one party assuming it.

[Akia]

A contract is just an obligation. Breaking the contract has consequences, not breaking the contract has consequences. It’s very normal for businesses to break contracts (and pay penalties) in order to switch to a new vendor for example, if he has a better product.

And no, it does not require both parties - as then, we’d be talking about a settlement, so not an actual breach of the contract.

This is tough at uni as well, a contract is just a business move as “cold” as that sounds.

[Butch]

Yes, I get that. However, the original point was “I don’t want to get fired over this”.

When you break a contract unilaterally, you’ve just made yourself vulnerable to just that. In these cases, the kind of people who don’t survive are often the ones a) already in the shitlist for other reasons or b) in the wrong spot at the wrong time (look, we need to cut costs and this person has made it easy for us to do it cheaply).

[Wolverine]

Yes, you break the contract to go to a new vendor. You don’t break the contract while expecting the current vendor to uphold their part of the contract (keeping you employed and paying the agreed upon salary) and not care that you don’t fulfill your part of it.

I agree that some terms in contracts can be illegal. If it is so, defy them and litigate them if you get attacked on them (legal protection insurances should cover wrongful terminations).

If you are feeling bad about upholding part of your contract, something in yourself is telling you that your situation is not right. You either don’t have the right employer (change industry, working for a bank is not a mandatory part of life, they’ll never get better if talented people agree to their terms even when they’re abusive. You are admittedly worth your salary, so, resourceful, which can be used by other employers in other industries) or you don’t have a behavior that matches either your ethics or your risk tolerance. Act accordingly.