Essential Strategies for Financial Services Compliance, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7The Legislative Environment and Rules Mapping

As a successful Compliance Officer you will already have, or will be in the process of creating, a list of all the pieces of legislation that are applicable to your firm's activities. And in order to operate to your full potential, once you know which legislation applies, you need to be able to find your way around it, because there will invariably be times when you are not sure what a particular rule is designed to achieve, where it comes from and whether there is any chance of being fined (or worse) if you or your colleagues fail to comply with it.

Sometimes, the only way to really get to grips with what is required is to go back to primary sources, i.e. the relevant sections of the piece of legislation that gave rise to the requirement in the first place. Of course, legislation is also useful for defining key terms and concepts – for example, the FCA's Glossary often simply refers the reader to the relevant section of FSMA, or other even more impenetrable texts such as EU directives, which is not particularly helpful unless you have copies of the legislation to hand, or know where you can easily get hold of them.

Obviously, for the majority of financial services firms operating in the UK, FSMA is the key piece of legislation. But that doesn't mean that other legislation can be ignored. There are many other laws with which you need to be familiar that directly affect financial services activities, several of which impose ...