Bryon Linnehan spent more than two years chasing bad guys around Iraq as a U.S. military-intelligence officer. Since May, he’s been using skills he honed on the battlefield to monitor electronic communications inside Barclays Plc.
Desperate to avoid more costly run-ins with regulators, investment banks are hiring former intelligence professionals like Linnehan to scrutinize virtually all aspects of their employees’ working lives, from how long they take for cigarette breaks to which websites they frequent. The goal: to deter the next market manipulator or rogue trader.
“There’s not much use in closing the barn door after the horse has left,” said Linnehan, 37, who works in Barclays’s New York office and was interviewed during a break fromNational Guard maneuvers in the Rocky Mountains. “We want to be able to identify any potential issues before they turn into anything troubling.”