The Compliance Revolution: How Compliance Needs to Change to Survive

Preface

This book is about maturity—corporate maturity—how businesses grow up and become more reasoned and responsible, and also more effective and better performing. It is also about the maturing of compliance into a profession, a critical function that sits at the interface between business and wider society. The quest is relevant to all forms of business and to many functions and the models presented here have general applicability.

What maturity is and how to grow is subtle and complex. We contend that however you define or try to create maturity, it is recognizable to customers, employees, and investors—and to regulators, who are increasingly concerned with corporate culture, integrity, governance, and conduct risk.

We use as our example financial services, a sector whose responsibility has been much challenged of late and where regulatory approaches and compliance practices are changing apace. Financial services also impacts many other areas of business that are dependent on its role while, as we have seen since the 2008 global financial crisis, its influence spreads out into the wider economy of Main Street and influences the opportunities and prosperity of many across our communities. Compliance has a key position, mediating between the powerful drivers in a highly competitive, complex, and internationalizing industry and the needs of the encircling realm of its multiple stakeholders. We will consider how compliance can use its pivotal role in strategically directing companies ...