Essential Strategies for Financial Services Compliance, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10Key Compliance Department Activities

This chapter considers the types of activities with which Compliance Officers are involved on a day-to-day basis. These can be split roughly into:

• routine activities; and
• advisory work, when Compliance is taken ‘off-piste’ and you are asked to tackle something new and unfamiliar.

10.1 Routine Activities

Financial services firms are involved in widely differing types of business, and if you compare your own regulatory and corporate universe with that of a colleague in another firm, even if they are involved in a broadly similar line of business, you will be surprised at the number of differences there are. No matter how different the line of business, however, Compliance departments generally have a fairly similar brief and will thus be involved in a similar set of routine activities. (Remember that all Compliance departments should have similar objectives, as discussed in Chapter 2.)

These basic, work-a-day activities constitute the foundation of your firm's Compliance regime and while they are certainly not rocket science you have to get them right: there's too much at stake with the regulators and in terms of your own reputation within the firm if you don't. Once you understand what the rules require and the internal procedures your firm has implemented, you will find that these functions are fairly straightforward and you will soon be doing many of them on auto pilot.

Even though they are not generally considered to be the ...