The emergence of new regulatory frameworks such as Sarbanes Oxley, revisions to the Basel risk management framework and the possibility of even more laws targeting the financial services sector might seem like a major burden to the banking services industry. However, if this is a dark cloud, there are several silver linings as well, one of which is the growing number of job openings in the compliance field.
The role of the compliance team is to ensure that the bank's operations and practices are in full compliance with relevant regulations. The compliance staff is considered the internal experts on new laws and regulations affecting the banking industry and what specific actions the bank needs to undertake in order to ensure compliance. In many banks, the compliance department is the custodian of policies and procedures within the organization thus ensuring any changes to these process documents is only done after the appropriate approval has been received. This also means that the compliance team is responsible for ensuring that these changes are actually implemented and that version control is continuously adhered to. One result of their responsibilities in overseeing this process is that compliance officers develop an intimate understanding of how each part of the bank operates. This is why many compliance job openings often insist on favoring candidates that demonstrate cross-functional analytical capabilities.
The compliance staff is sometimes responsible for collating and reporting certain reports required by the regulator such as suspicious transactions reports. This why compliance job employment advertisements will usually require one to have good communication skills since an incorrectly worded report to a regulatory agency can either lead to a false alarm or fail to trigger an alarm when it was intended to. Due to the sensitive nature of their role, members of the compliance department are expected to maintain high standards of integrity. Compliance and regulation jobs often have to sift through sensitive client, employee and organizational data in the course of their duties.
Those persons employed in compliance jobs work closely with internal audit teams. The actual structure and reporting lines of the compliance department vary from bank to bank with one major consideration being the size of the bank itself. Smaller banks sometimes merge their compliance and internal legal unit or tax units. Larger banks will not only have a compliance department, they also further breakdown the compliance function to have independent anti money laundering unit and Bank Secrecy Act compliance units. You can usually tell from compliance job employment advertisements what kind of structure the bank advertising these job openings has.
