Tip of the Iceberg: Email Problem Is Bigger Than LPL

I’ve written before on the growing volume of emails we all get, and the resulting time drain that results from even reading them all. To get a better handle on the real scope of the email “problem,” I did a little research on the Internet. Surprisingly, there’s scant information on the Net about email volumes, and, not so surprising, most of what’s there is about marketing.

But here’s what I was able to find: According to a report by the Internet research firm The Radicati Group in Palo Alto, Calif., as of April 2012, there were 2.5 billion email users worldwide, sending some 145 billion emails every day, which works out to 58 emails per day each, 21,170 emails per year each, and some 53 trillion emails every year altogether. As for growth, in 2010, there were 1.8 billion users, which means we’re up 700 million users or a 39% gain in two years. Radicati’s figure indicate that by 2016, we’re looking at a 32% increase in users and in today’s volumes, which means in three years, we could be dealing with in the neighborhood of 70 trillion emails a year. What does that mean for broker-dealers in the U.S.? Radicati reports that business email usage runs about double the daily average per user, which would put it in the range of 116 emails per day, or about 42,000 emails a year, per broker. By its own count, FINRA currently oversees 676,000 registered reps, so that works out to be 28.4 billion emails a year, give or take, for brokerage firms to archive and monitor, increasing at around 8% or so year.

The bottom line: We’re talking about one heck of a lot of emails for BDs to save and supervise. And that number’s only going to get bigger.  I suppose FINRA can just keep fining firms as their systems continue to struggle to keep with the ballooning volume of emails—and use the proceeds to underwrite their entire operation.

In the past ten years, in addition to LPL, FINRA seems to have fined at least other four firms for email violations (Morgan Stanley, $10.6 million in 2005; MetLife, $1.2 million in 2009; Piper Jaffray, $700,000 in 2010; and ING, $1.2 million in February of this year). Or maybe it could get beyond its bureaucratic mentality, and work with its member firms to find realistic solutions to a problem that’s clearly on the verge of spinning out of control.