Financial Crime: Mirroring the Growth of Compliance

In the 14 years we have been specialising in the compliance sector, we have seen many trends and we’re witnessing a very interesting one now; financial crime in 2018 is mirroring the growth we saw in compliance between 2001 and 2016.

The highly aggressive global regulation on financial crime is driving demand, creating the same impact 9/11 and the credit crunch had on compliance. High profile anti-money laundering (AML) investigations are hitting the headlines on a regular basis, with reports of Deutsche Bank, Danske Bank and UBS all facing huge fines in the last few months.

With such significant scrutiny, financial crime has seen sustained growth in terms of: team numbers, compensation, department sizes, volumes of Managing Directors and therefore budgets allocated to servicing this function. This is exactly what we saw at the start of the rapid acceleration in compliance fifteen years ago.

The drive to protect against ever evolving threats requires talented, dedicated teams and the subsequent demand is pushing up compensation. For a sector that has previously had smaller budgets and less resource, we predict that by the end of 2019, the number of Managing Directors in financial crime and the level of compensation will be on a par with those in compliance at large international banking groups.

Compliance isn’t going anywhere, it still has its own constant supply of regulation to address but it is certainly evolving. The forecast for 2019 shows that it is critical for firms to have a solid financial crime operation and we’re very well placed to help with this. If you’d like to discuss strengthening your function, please get in touch.