GROWING THE COMPLIANCE SKILLSET TO MEET THE NEXT TECHNOLOGY EVOLUTION
R&C: Like most areas in financial services, the compliance role is always evolving. Where do you see the next evolution of the compliance role headed?
Hotz: The most important evolution that we are seeing in compliance today is the effect technology is having on how we aggregate and interpret datasets. This change is having a profound impact on the function of the compliance officer itself. Today, one will typically find different types of compliance roles, inhabited by people with very different skillsets. For example, on one side, there are people that look after communications data. They are responsible for reviewing and making sense of this unstructured information to help with surveillance, searches and policy adherence. On the other side, there are people focused on transactional data, managing the risks associated with market abuse and manipulation of this structured dataset. Traditionally, there is a test associated within communications surveillance as well as a separate test on the transactional side. These two datasets are likely surveilled by different people – likely on different teams – making it very hard to manage the risk of insider trading effectively. The evolution is going to take place in terms of how firms look to unite these datasets to manage risks much more effectively. The success of this will be predicated on three essential elements of any organisation – people, technology and processes. Compliance officers will need to adapt and use technology to better harness the myriad datasets at their disposal to stay on top of this evolution.
Apr-Jun 2021 Issue
Bloomberg L.P.