JPMorgan Staff Irked Over Order to Save Texts on Personal Phones

It’s an open secret that many Wall Street denizens have been taking a certain forbidden liberty while working from home: Tapping text messages to colleagues and clients on smartphones untethered to workplace surveillance systems. Now some of them are panicking.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. -- often a standard-setter for the industry -- is ordering traders, bankers, financial advisers and even some branch employees to sift through years of text messages on personal devices and set aside any related to work, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

One recent internal notice seen by Bloomberg directed recipients to not only ...