TORONTO – Toronto-Dominion Bank is deploying WorkiQ software to monitor employees within its financial crimes and risk management divisions as the lender seeks to optimize productivity and resource allocation.
The move introduces granular tracking of staff activity in a high-stakes regulatory environment where the bank has significantly expanded its compliance headcount following record-breaking penalties for money laundering failures in the United States and Canada.
The implementation of the software reflects a broader corporate shift toward “bossware” to reclaim oversight lost during the transition to hybrid work models. For a systemically important financial institution (SFI) like Toronto-Dominion Bank, the drive for efficiency is coupled with the need to demonstrate rigorous internal controls to regulators under anti-money-laundering and sanctions regimes.
The WorkiQ software, provided by ActiveOps, tracks specific digital footprints designed to quantify how staff spend their day rather than capture the content of their work:
- Time spent on web browsers
- Activity within internal chat applications
- Usage of meeting applications
- Time spent in spreadsheet applications, such as Excel (without tracking specific cell data)
The bank stated the deployment is “standard practice across the industry,” adding that automated solutions are used to improve insights and better allocate resources across case work and investigations. The company noted the tool is not AI and is used to help managers more accurately manage workflows, team capacity, and performance, rather than to score individual keystrokes or messages.
The push for increased transparency follows a period of intense regulatory scrutiny. TD has invested heavily in its compliance infrastructure after paying the largest fine ever levied against a major bank in Canada for money laundering violations. In the banking sector, failure to maintain effective anti-money laundering (AML) frameworks can lead to deferred prosecution agreements, capital surcharges, and severe operational restrictions, including limits on growth in higher-risk business lines.
The stakes extend beyond TD’s internal management culture. Large banks operating in North America are expected to show credible, data-driven evidence that compliance units are adequately staffed and supervised under regimes such as the U.S. Bank Secrecy Act and its implementing rules. Time-and-motion analytics of the sort generated by WorkiQ are increasingly used to justify headcount decisions, support interactions with regulators, and inform board-level risk committees about whether remediation plans are on track.
During a team call, Deanna Pacitti, TD’s associate vice president of high-risk investigations, addressed staff concerns regarding privacy and the manual burden of current processes.
“The idea is it’s going to show pain points, where do we spend too much time … We know we have a lot of pain points across our systems,” Pacitti said.
Employees questioned whether the software would be used for performance management and whether explicit consent was required. Some staff suggested that resources spent on monitoring could be better utilized to automate manual processes that slow investigations and increase the risk of backlogs. Pacitti acknowledged the prevalence of manual effort, stating, “I can only hope that this will further prove that point.”
The bank’s internal FAQ document indicates a focus on establishing baselines for “unaccounted-for time” during the workday, specifically addressing whether employees can use the internet during lunch hours and how breaks will be categorized. The guidance underscores that managers will be able to see aggregate patterns of activity, while insisting the program is not designed as a real-time surveillance tool.
TD’s approach mirrors trends at other global financial institutions. JPMorgan has implemented monitoring of junior investment bankers’ hours, citing employee well-being and adherence to policies on maximum working time. Conversely, some technology firms are retreating from aggressive tracking; Meta recently scaled back plans to collect mouse movements and keystrokes for AI training following employee resistance and internal debates over data use.
The bank maintains that safeguards are in place to protect privacy and that colleagues are informed of the tool’s purpose, limitations, and deployment areas. TD has told employees that monitoring must align with local employment and privacy laws in the jurisdictions where it operates, and that oversight of the program sits within broader corporate governance and risk frameworks.
The software remains active within the financial crimes and risk management units as the bank continues to define acceptable time-accounting expectations for its hybrid workforce. How TD ultimately uses the resulting data – whether primarily to streamline investigative workflows or to enforce stricter performance metrics – will be closely watched by staff and may offer an early signal of how other highly regulated institutions balance digital surveillance with workplace trust.
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