mcgregor-boyall.com

Q3 2015

UK & Europe | The Middle East | Asia Pacific

Overall, the demand for compliance and financial crime professional continues unabated. The increased regulatory pressures, as well as recent fines, have caused banks to reassess their compliance functions and target operating models.

The largest challenge facing potential employers is that a large proportion of new roles, are either due to the growth of existing functions, or the creation of completely new functions. As many of our clients are increasing the size of their compliance teams concurrently, this has had a knock-on effect to the number of quality candidates on the market. Within new functions, our clients are searching for candidates that will have not performed the specific role previously and locating the right quality of candidate, not only with the transferable skill set but also with a genuine interest in compliance, has been a challenge.

There has been marked increase in the off and nearshoring of compliance functionality specifically within KYC/AML, Onboarding and monitoring teams. This has been driven by cost-efficiency as well as available talent pools in Ireland, Poland and Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow.

Many banks are bringing in a de facto second and a half line of defence which is driving the need for increasing the size of assurance and monitoring & testing teams. These teams are responsible for ensuring that the second line of defence are performing the correct checks and recording the risks and controls in place. From a projects perspective, the senior managers regime, setting up e-communications monitoring and financial crime transaction monitoring have been the largest hirers.

In demand skill sets:

Compliance & Financial Crime Update

Intro Industry newsSecuring high quality new staff

is highly competitive with the

incidence and size of counter

offers being far larger. Moving

in to Q4, the active candidate

pool is decreasing, as many of

those searching for new roles

have already done so and in Q4

candidates are either happy in

their present positions, or face

the prospect of having to walk

away from an annual bonus.

Regulatory Change and Advisory

(Senior Managers Regime, Structural Reform, Recovery and Resolution)

Sanctions Advisory

Audit/assurance/Risk review

Regulatory and

Financial Crime Policy

mcgregor-boyall.com

Salary Trending

Salaries, on the whole, have continued to rise with an average increase of 25% of those candidates that move jobs and average increase of around 10% of those staying within their current roles as employers react to outside market influences.

In previous years, candidates’ salary expectations have often been much higher as they saw the opportunity to gain large increases in salary due to the heightened need for compliance professionals. We have noticed that candidates’ expectations have become a lot more realistic as the initial hype surrounding compliance and financial recruitment has subsided and market conditions have become more widely known to the candidate pool.

Diversity

McGregor Boyall has always been a big supporter of bringing diversity in to the workplace. Although our clients in other areas of the company have been more vocal about redressing the gender imbalance, we have found that within compliance and financial crime we have not had the same issues.

McGregor Boyall run a standalone division called Women in Technology (http://www.womenintechnology.co.uk/) that works in conjunction with all internal teams to ensure that diversity is taken in to account when working with both clients and candidates.

Contact

Amreet Rai

Senior Compliance Consultant

E: arai@mcgregor-boyall.com

T: 0207 422 9209