The skills you need for a career in financial services compliance

Compliance in financial services sits in an interesting part of the industry. Surrounded by lawyers and finance types, they’re more like lawyers than anything else. In turn, the skills you need for a career in compliance are very different to the rest of the middle office.

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For one, you’ll need an understanding of the legal and regulatory framework surrounding both the business you cover and the overall financial services industry. The regulatory environment is constantly changing. You’ll also need to be acutely aware of the changes and the implications for the way business is done. Failure to do so may have severe financial and reputational costs.

Good compliance people also have excellent communication skills. While this requirement is not unique to compliance, it is particularly important given that a major component of the job involves the explanation of often-complex rules and regulations. Compliance is often called to provide interpretations of complicated rules that must be understood by everyone from new hires to senior management.

You’ll need to be a good problem-solver. The rules are not static. Compliance officers are charged both with addressing current issues and anticipating potential new ones. They must have a good sense for the direction of business practice and the evolution of the laws and regulations.

Compliance issues affect everyone in an organization and staff must be able to establish good relationships from the top to the bottom. This requires an ability to read individuals and to develop relationships that span the organization. This can be tricky, as compliance officers sometimes have to say “no” to things.

Compliance people need to show good business acumen and understand the functions they cover. They must be seen as promoting the interests of their internal clients and not labelled as the “business prevention department.” Being called “commercial” is one of the highest compliments a compliance officer can receive.

Compliance officers are often called upon to make difficult decisions. They need a keen sense of right and wrong. Banks rely on compliance to define the often-vague restrictions written into laws. Compliance professionals need to be “above the fray”, and capable of making the right call even when it may be unpopular.

And of course, you need technical knowledge. Technology is changing rapidly in financial services, and compliance professionals need to understand technology infrastructure. Once upon a time, digital banks like Revolut and cryptocurrency blockchains were shiny new things to contend with. Now, these are part and parcel of the industry, and have been regulated for several years. New innovations in finance and technology must be kept up to date with, and how the regulatory landscape around them is changing is no different. 

Increasingly, and especially for junior professionals, you need to understand artificial intelligence. AI is changing the job significantly, and new skills are coming to prominence: the ability to supervise AI agents performing routine compliance work, and being able to intervene as a specialist in edge cases. Regulatory technology (RegTech) firm WorkFusion said earlier this year that financial crime compliance will increasingly become a “knowledge profession” rather than just a processing function.

As AI will squeeze junior hiring, and eventually shrink compliance team sizes industry-wide by increasing individual productivity, it will become increasingly important to have a broad understanding of the industry.

Ken Weiller, a veteran compliance and operating professional with experience in both banks and the hedge fund industry, told us several  years ago that compliance professionals in hedge funds have responsibilities spanning everything from approving and regulating employees’ personal trades to participating in decisions about the allocation of expenses to investors. As AI makes compliance teams leaner and meaner, that scale of responsibility might come to traditionally larger teams such as banks’.

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