Creating and implementing an effective compliance monitoring policy
| Pages | 224-228 |
| Published date | 01 September 2005 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/13581980510622081 |
| Date | 01 September 2005 |
| Author | Hannah Marshall |
| Subject Matter | Accounting & Finance,Financial risk/company failure,Financial compliance/regulation |
Creating and implementing an effective
compliance monitoring policy
Hannah Marshall
Received: 6th January, 2005
Director of Legal & Compliance, J O H Hambro Investment Management Limited
Hannah Marshall qualified as a solicitor in
1992 having trained with the city law firm,
Titmuss Sainer and Webb (now Dechert).
She subsequently worked as a lawyer in
private practice at City and West End firms
and joined JOHIM in 2001 in order to pro-
vide legal expertise and advice inhouse.
Hannah is responsible for all legal and
regulatory functions and leads the Compli-
ance Department. She is JOHIM’s Com-
pany Secretary and Money Laundering
Reporting Officer.
Creating and implementing an appropriate
and effective compliance monitoring pro-
gramme for any firm is a challenge,
whether it is building a completely new
system for a start-up or overhauling and
benchmarking an existing system.
Because of every firm’s diverse require-
ments it may help to consider five distinct
areas — the fact that there is no such thing
as a universal monitoring policy, the fact
that every firm will have different require-
ments and a different strategy, the fact that
it is essential to have senior management
on board and buying into any system to be
implemented, the fact that without a moni-
toring policy a firm just cannot operate and,
lastly, the fact that in order to implement an
effective compliance monitoring policy you
need to have an effective Compliance
Department.
It is, of course, blindingly obvious that
there can be no such thing as ‘one size fits
all’ when it comes to a compliance moni-
toring programme. The best strategy for
one firm will be completely ineffective for
another. A private client investment firm
will have a lot of private client issues to
monitor. Such issues will not even register
on a large institutional firm’s radar. Con-
versely, that larger firm may have dozens
of ISDA Agreements and hundreds of
packaged products to worry about which
the smaller private client firm does not
need to concern itself with. The compliance
monitoring programme of such two firms
cannot be based on the same risks and each
firm’s programme will, self evidently, con-
tain different tasks, undertaken at different
intervals. Further, a discretionary invest-
ment manager will need to ensure that a
good percentage of its compliance monitor-
ing programme is allocated to checking the
suitability of stocks picked for its discretion-
ary clients. But that investment manager
may have only a handful of advisory clients
and, therefore, possibly just one small
monthly compliance monitoring check
dealing with that part of its client base. If
the situation were to be reversed then the
compliance monitoring programme of the
investment manager would look very dif-
ferent, with client instruction checks taking
up a good percentage of the compliance
monitoring programme whilst suitability
Page 224
Journal of Financial Regulation and Compliance Volume 13 Number 3
Journal of Financial Regulation
and Compliance, Vol. 13, No. 3,
2005, pp. 224–228
#Emerald Group Publishing
Limited, 1358–1988
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