This is the resounding message seeping from countless worried companies on both sides of the Atlantic.
As regulators persist in checking on the honesty and integrity of numerous organisations they are fuelling a bonanza of new roles and soaring salaries.
Compliance professional are the toast of financial services
Ian Clark , Hays Financial Markets [1]
Congratulations if you’re a CCO. Fortune suggests you hold one of the “10 hot executive jobs in 2014.” And the Wall Street Journal confirms you have a: “dream career” translated into this revealing chart:
Your salary can reach $232,000 (£142k) a year. In fact, the total compensation for experts like you is up 25 percent on the previous two years. [2]
The drain on top management
Compliance staff are expected to earn their money though. One of the toughest places to work is a financial institution, since this tends to be most in the regulators’ sights.
Concerns about illegality and failure to comply often means digging deep into the company’s past trading history. For instance, the US Justice Department has just announced investigations into possible bribery allegations over winning business from Gadaffi’s Libya, back in 2011.
This latest probe has a parallel criminal enquiry. This may affect Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse Group AG, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Société Générale and a lesser known hedge-fund operator.
Such digging takes a toll. In a letter to shareholders last year Jamie Dimon’s CEO of J.P. Morgan claimed for example, “our control agenda is priority #1.” Which suggests it’s his priority too, taking up not much less than 60% of his time.
Top management effort to cope with this stuff can be draining. A while back for instance, Pequot Capital Management shut its doors amid a revived insider-trading probe. The exhausted 68 year old founder threw in the towel. Denying any impropriety he told investors the continuing investigations “..have cast a cloud over the firm and have become a source of personal distraction. [3]
With this kind of impact along with swinging fines, no wonder one consulting service calls the situation
a battle royal for talent in the compliance space, across the board
A similar trend exists in Asia. There too the regulatory environment is evolving into ever greater complexity.[4] The result is also extra recruitment and higher pay for such experts.
All this is great should your career happens to be in this area of employment. Not so good if you are trying to keep the costs of meeting regulations and reducing risk within reasonable bounds.
Is LMS the answer?
Apart from hiring an ever-expanding army of experts is there an alternative?
One favoured solution is technology. For example, sellers of mechanised learning systems claim these deliver all kinds of benefits including ways to
- Assess whether key individuals understand their obligations, and enough to meet or exceed relevant benchmarks
- Identify and rectify any shortfalls and
- Help maintain the integrity of the overall scheme [5]
These computer-based solutions assume you can automate ethics. Their tick box approach is at odds with what will reduce reputational risk.
Compliance and Ethical Engagement
A viable, long-term solution cannot be to go on hiring new staff and even greater IT investments.
The answer is finding ways to create genuine ethical engagement, in which employees rely on values as their guide for action, rather than be compliance-driven. The chart shows the present situation based on various sources including research by LRN:
Just over four out of ten companies tend to fall into the category of being compliant. That is their employees just follow any rules to the best of their ability, without doing much beyond that.
About half of all companies have staff willing to commit to making the compliance system work. These people though show little real interest in identifying or dealing with difficult ethical choices. However, they do support the overall aim of reducing reputational and regulatory risk.
A small minority, no more than 3% of companies, have genuinely “ethically engaged” staff. These are the ones who are “self-governing”. Their involvement and motivation promotes the risk reduction effort. Three distinct benefits come from this approach:
- People begin to take personal responsibility for ethical choices.
- Awareness at the individual level grows of why unethical behaviour can be so damaging.
- Growth occurs in the confidence to speak up; employees become willing to warn when they see things heading towards trouble.
How to achieve such staff is therefore the critical issue. This is the true challenge facing companies, not the never-ending search for extra compliance workers.
