Is it just me, or does it seem as if the Brits are much more serious about preventing market fraud than we are?

LONDON — Investment bankers and traders in Britain will have their mobile phone conversations recorded in the latest step by the country’s financial regulator to crack down on insider trading and market abuse.

The Financial Services Authority, Britain’s financial watchdog, said Thursday that under new rules, effective next November, all financial services firms will be required to record any relevant communication by employees on their work cellphones.

Companies would also be responsible for discouraging employees from taking client orders or discussing and arranging transactions on their private cellphones, where conversations cannot be recorded.

The new rule makes Britain the only country in Europe to explicitly require the taping of conversations on business cellphones, according to the F.S.A. Rules in other European countries merely require companies to ensure that all relevant conversations are recorded.

“We expect the rules to increase the volume and quality of information available to us to use as additional evidence in insider trading cases,” Sarah Bailey, a spokeswoman for the agency said.

The F.S.A. already required the recording of conversations on office land lines and the storage of business e-mails, but exempted cellphones until now because the technology was not available, Ms. Bailey said. The rule will affect about 16,000 cellphones issued by financial services firms, which will be required to keep the recorded conversations for six months.

The new rule will also require “firms to take reasonable steps to ensure that such communications do not take place on private communication equipment that firms cannot record mainly for privacy reasons,” the F.S.A. wrote in the policy statement published Thursday.

[...] Recording cellphone conversations may be a technique more commonly used to fight terrorism than financial crime, but Britain would not be the first country to use taped cellphone conversations to support insider-trading cases. In what was thought to be a first of its kind on such a scale on Wall Street, United States prosecutors used court-ordered wiretaps in their recent case against Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of Galleon Group hedge fund.

For day-to-day activities, United States regulatory agencies have resisted a blanket mandate on recording work phone conversations for the financial services industry. The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has only one obscure rule on taping, according to a spokeswoman, Nancy Condon. Companies with a high concentration of employees who have been associated with firms that were expelled for sales practice violations must tape phone conversations with current and future customers.