> The gatherings, which were described by several people familiar with them who asked not to be identified, tend to feature discussions of nuts-and-bolts issues such as managing relationships with the board and whether compliance personnel should receive stock incentives.

That's some Illuminati-level secret society stuff right there. Clickbait much?

> I'm sure compliance personnel, at least, would like to know what is said in the discussions about them

It's not common practice to record office conversations. Neither is it common to forbid offsite meetings.

Why should an attorney for a competing firm be party to any discussion as to your future compensation?

There's a higher-level discussion wherein the compliance guys are supposed to be the watchmen, but if you give them stock or options, then they are suddenly incentivized to do whatever is most profitable for the firm. That's the discussion mentioned.

The counterpoint is that, if you have strong regulators, then they will sniff out the funny business anyway. The resultant fines would hurt the bank's stock, which would still be negative for the compliance personnel.

There, we just had a discussion as to compliance workers' future compensation. And we're not even in the business!

They're not talking about individuals' compensation specifically. They're talking about the legal risks surrounding incentive compensation. It's like developers getting together to talk about two-factor authentication.

I'm pretty sure the last conversation I had in an office was recorded; and broadcast live.

Sounds like your typical CxO support group.

In summary: A group of people who work in the same field get together periodically to talk shop. Just in nicer digs than your average Meetup.

This is a very old story:

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

Damn, my nights drinking with other programmers have clearly been very much wasted!

And get upset when the existence of meeting is made public

>whether compliance personnel should receive stock incentives.

I don't this is about underpaying them but rather about legal complexities of inherent conflict of interest between compliance and stock based compensation. E.g. You don't want a compliance officer to look in the other direction to ensure her stock appreciates. This seems like a reasonable question/topic for a meeting of lawyers.

They are conflicted themselves; secretly (sources won't even reveal their identities) managing board relationships and deciding on compensation matters. The question is reasonable, the secrecy isn't. The question should be addressed openly.

> the secrecy isn't

They won't reveal their identities to Bloomberg. This is like saying "Apple won't release attendance and transcripts of its executive meetings to the New York Times; therefore, they are up to no good".

Seems more similar to, "Jobs and Schmidt are emailing and we think it's about wages".

the author seems desperate to imply some "elite" conspiracy dan brown style mysterious global cabal.

in reality, every person in every social/business position wants to hang out with people in similar positions.

devs go to dev conferences, cio's go to cio events, archivist librarians go to archive/library conferences, gas station owners go to oil company events in Hawaii.

How is this different to software engineers meeting up?

Software engineers getting together to talk about which programming language is best, what software to use, etc..

Isn't that level of coordination against competition laws?