Compliance Officer's Life with Frustrating Day

COMPLIANCE OFFICER'S LIFE WITH FRUSTRATING DAY One of the things that still amazes me about the field of regtech is how similar the needs are no matter who the client is, where they’re headquartered or who is managing their compliance programs. It’s striking to see how compliance officers around the world face the exact same problems and struggles in their day-today. At Shield, we spend a lot of time talking to compliance officers to explore and learn how we can best support them. Let’s break it down by diving into a day in the life of a compliance officer.

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A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A COMPLIANCE OFFICER To bring a level of personalization to this story, we’re going to call our compliance officer, Tom. Monday is pretty much just like Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday. Friday is a little different in that Tom and a few of his co-workers typically grab a takeaway (takeout) from their favorite deli next door to the firm and have lunch together. But, for the last year, in the COVID era of remote work, they haven’t kept up with the tradition, so all the days of the week tend to blur together.

Each day begins the same way for Tom. He wakes up, pours a coffee, and settles down in front of his terminal. His inbox contains a few dozen emails with various requests to investigate some suspicious trades, provide status updates on some of the cases he’s working, and confirm his attendance at a couple of meetings later that day and that week.

Today, he’s greeted with 102 alerts; it’s going to be a busy day after all and he had guessed hoped that the day’s alert tally would be 78. Alas, wishful thinking. He makes his way through the alerts as he makes his way through his lunch. Even working from home, there’s not really sufficient time to take a proper break and lounge through lunch.

KEY CHALLENGES A day in the life of a compliance officer is an exercise in patience, monotony – and frustration. Although the task of reviewing, assessing, and scoring each alert for its inherent level of risk is mundane, alert saturation takes its toll on a person. On the surface, his task seems simple, but it carries great responsibility.

Email is mindless – alert review is anything but.

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Next, Tom puts in a search query and requests to harvest all the financial transactions tagged to Trader A. There’s a lot of them.

More than usual. That in of itself is a flag. But therein lies the challenge: he put a request in to get access to the transactions because he can’t actually see them.

ONE POSSIBLE SOLUTION Sounds easy right?

Well, here’s the catch, all these data sources are stored in separate systems, with a different IT admin in charge who of course won’t give him access to this vital information so easily, needs approval and so on and so on. Not to mention the 100’s of alerts Tom needs to review in the hopes of finding a smidge of a scenario that can be turned into a real investigation.

So what do you do about it?

For years, the approach financial firms have taken to compliance, regulations and their requirements have been tactical, “cross that bridge when you get there” mindset. Buying systems and licenses with every requirement that arose – for example if the regulation said to record calls, they bought a system just for that and the list goes on as the communication channels grew.

This created an IT disruption called data silos.

From a compliance standpoint, at Shield, we placed all that data into our compliance platform using AI-powered correlation engines. And now a Compliance Officer like Tom will have a visualized workspace to dig through relevant data and inevitably create effective investigations.

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