Despite outperforming other sectors throughout the Olympic economic
downturn, UK financial services’ CFOs and COOs are spending an
average 18% of their time, representing almost one day every week,
dealing with regulatory change, according to a survey
by finance recruitment consultancy Robert Half Financial
Services Group.
According to the June 2012 survey, 59% of UK
financial services executives said time spent on managing
regulatory change is now ‘more’ or ‘significantly more’ than it was
three years ago, before the recession.
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Furthermore, 38% of respondents said their
teams were ‘not very’ or ‘not at all knowledgeable’ about changes
in regulations; with the figure rising to 50% of respondents from
medium-sized businesses, followed by 39% from small businesses.
Large businesses fared significantly better with only 22% of their
executives saying their teams do not have the requisite
understanding.
The UK fared worse than its international
counterparts in average perception of regulatory knowledge: 89% of
CFOs and COOs in Hong Kong said their teams are “somewhat” or
“very” knowledgeable, followed by 82% of peers in Germany and 70%
in Singapore.
Unsurprisingly, 87% of UK executives feel that
staff should be knowledgable about regulatory change, but only 62%
feel their staff are sufficiently informed.
‘Tick and bash mentality’
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By GlobalDataNeil Owen, global practice director
at Robert Half, said finance compliance professionals “face a
real dilemma: they have no choice but to manage the huge workload
that regulatory change represents, but also find that their teams
lack the necessary knowledge to keep their companies on top of it
all;” the upshot of which would be increased demand for “interim
and permanent FS staff with proven regulatory compliance and
management skills.”
Meanwhile Jim Muir, director of AutoRek, a
global financial controls software provider, has called for the
simplification of compliance within financial services and that, in
particular, “more automation and more auditability would reduce the
burden and move organisations away from a tick and bash
mentality”.
Karen Wagstaffe, director of training and compliance at
I-Comply-Online, a system that provides learning material for
regulatory compliance, said the findings fit with her experience of
working with finance staff who “have to spend more and more time on
compliance function.”
On the varied level of employees’ compliance
knowledge, Wagstaffe suggested the need for staff knowledge of
regulations depended on size and sales processes of a business, but
warned regulation “was going to get worse before it gets
better.”
