The Compliance Revolution: How Compliance Needs to Change to Survive

Chapter 5Culture

One Team, One Dream.

—One of the “Forex fixing” team names revealed by FCA (November 13, 2014)

Ethics is not enough. Ethics and their associated principles need to be embedded and integrated into corporate culture.

For compliance to be effective and sustainable, especially under difficult conditions, ethics and principles need to be part of corporate culture and internalised in the hearts and minds of individuals. An emphasis on a culture has emerged as an essential element of regulation in two phases, one prior to the 2008 GFC, and one more recently. Using the UK and Singapore as the clearest examples of the two phases:

1. There is direct attention to influencing and measuring corporate culture, typified by the Treating Customers Fairly initiative in the UK starting in 2006–2007, and Fair Dealing in Singapore, introduced from 2010 within the Financial Advice Act.
2. The formation of FCA (UK's new Financial Conduct Authority) in 2013 brought a focus on conduct risk, defined as the likelihood of behaviours occurring that might produce poor consumer outcomes. This is an indirect approach to culture as behaviour arises from corporate culture. This second phase is also seen in Singapore with the Financial Advisory Industry Review (FAIR).

In a sense the second phase of interest in culture is a result of the first phase's perceived lack of success as many compliance departments failed to understand how to shape and influence culture. By reinventing the cultural focus ...