Essential Strategies for Financial Services Compliance, 2nd Edition

Chapter 2The Compliance Function

Compliance is still a young profession: the odds are that if you tell the person sitting next to you at a dinner party that you are a Compliance Officer he or she will give you a blank look and ask ‘did you say “complaints”?' When you respond ‘Compliance', they ask you what that is. You have to be careful how you respond. If you say ‘I am employed to tell bankers how to behave' as I once did just to keep things simple, I received the response ‘well you haven't done a very good job, have you?' But it is not just the general public that feels uncertain of what Compliance is all about. Many people reading this text will be ‘Compliance Officers' working in a ‘Compliance department', and will be conscious that these are components of a larger and more abstract phenomenon called the ‘Compliance function', which is somehow an agent and sponsor of a ‘Compliance culture'. As such, you will know that all of these terms are in wide circulation, particularly in regulatory circles, but can be extremely slippery when you try to define them. There is no universally accepted definition of the term ‘Compliance Officer', nor is there a definitive list of what a Compliance Officer does or does not do, or of what the Compliance function comprises. And ‘Compliance culture' is at once transparently obvious as an idea and frustratingly woolly as a practical proposition.

This chapter aims to establish satisfactory working definitions of all of these terms, but also ...