Emojis Could Prompt a Customer Complaint, FINRA Exec Warns

Broker-dealers and their reps, take note: The use of emojis in emails and text messages could prompt a customer complaint, according to Michael Solomon, head of FINRA’s national exam program.

“Emojis are something that didn’t exist in email before,” Solomon said on a panel discussion at FINRA’s annual conference in late May. “You could foresee situations in text messaging where an emoji might be a [Rule] 4530 customer complaint.”

FINRA examiners, Solomon continued, “will be looking at the written supervisory procedures and what has changed, particularly, in the last couple of years in those procedures.”

Examiners at the broker-dealer self-regulator will be “looking to see whether text messaging is ingested properly, just as email is ingested — how it’s surveilled and supervised, whether there are changes to lexicon programs that are more geared to how people converse in email than in text messaging, which is clipped and often acroynmed.”

The lexicons that exist “may not work so well in the world of text messaging,” Solomon said.