Want an adrenaline squirt from your job in banking? You could work as a high yield trader focused on the oil and gas market. Or, you could work in compliance.
The Wall Street Journal says compliance professionals at US investment banks are living in a state of fear. They are “shaking in their boots,” according to one senior compliance recruiter. Another recruiter declares that at least 36 compliance professionals left their jobs (and, we assume the industry in general) in 2015 as paranoia got the best of them.
Anti-money laundering and financial crime compliance professionals are reportedly the most unnerved, although anxiety is pervading the entire function. Regulators’ increasing tendency to hold compliance professionals personally liable for wrongdoing is behind the panic, which is only likely to get worse. – New York’s Department of Financial Services is proposing rules which will require compliance professionals to certify that banks’ monitoring systems are working properly, and which will hold them criminally liable if they’re not.
The good news is the danger money. With fewer people wanting exposure to the perils of a compliance career and with banks wanting to do a lot of compliance hiring, compliance pay is rising. Anti-money laundering executives can now earn $600k a year and ‘senior compliance professionals’ in other areas can earn $2m. However, the roles may come with associated costs – the WSJ says compliance professionals are increasingly taking out liability insurance and engaging their own legal counsels.
Separately, Pete Eggleston, head of Morgan Stanley’s ‘fixed income trading’s quantitative solutions and innovations group in London,’ has been talking to a journalist engaged by Morgan Stanley itself about the strange sorts of people he wants to hire.
Eggleston’s desired recruits include fluid dynamics theorists who are ‘experts on the ebb and flow of rivers,’ biologists and neuroscientists. Academics in these fields are accustomed to using mathematical models which can be more complex than those currently used in finance, and which can help explain the behaviour of markets.
Efinancialcareers
