02.
After an initial few years training and qualifying as a UK Chartered Accountant at Price Waterhouse, London, I was attracted by the excitement of the City of London.
In 1986, financial markets in the UK were deregulated. Banks, stockbroking firms and stock jobbing firms were permitted to amalgamate for the first time with foreign ownership allowed. This brought in a huge amount of new capital to the London financial markets and introduced many more market participants. One byproduct was the creation of significant issues over conflicts of interest between the various business units of these new institutions.
Compliance functions in the UK were established to identify, handle, monitor and resolve these conflicts – and for ten years I was fortunate to be at the vanguard of one of these at the investment banking arm of Barclays, Barclays de Zoete Wedd (BZW).
At the same time, a new way of regulating financial services was being developed, would continue to evolve over many years – and still evolves. This has resulted in increased requirements for the industry, higher scrutiny from regulators, and serious penalties for non-compliance – all leading to the need for the industry to take compliance much more seriously than it had, and to have in-house expertise on the subject. Over the years, this has helped create a generational shift in the ethics and culture required for success in financial services, both at an institutional and individual level.
Over my time in the City, Compliance functions developed beyond simply looking at conflicts of interest, through to being the area that the business relied upon to identify, institutionalise, be the expert advisor on, monitor, investigate where appropriate, and report on all laws, rules and regulations applying to the specific business undertaken by the financial services institution.
Outside financial services, Compliance developed to embrace all rules and regulations applicable to a business.
My own compliance career developed from investment banking at BZW, to investment management (JP Morgan), to international banking (Rabobank International), through to being the Group Compliance Director at Lloyds TSB, a major retail banking group in the UK, with 70,000 employees and 17 million customers and where Compliance had a staff of over 600 personnel. By that time, Compliance had become a profession in its own right.
But I had also always been attracted by being on the other side of the regulatory fence, so to speak, and in working overseas. In 2006 both of these aspirations were achieved when I went out to the Gulf as a Managing Director in charge of Authorisations and Regulatory Services at the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority.
This enabled me to experience both life as an expat in an exciting developing part of the world, and to see how a regulator was organised internally and worked. After three years I was asked to help build, through organising the fit out and establishing the operating systems, the Qatar Financial Centre Judiciary – and was lucky enough to be able to work with very eminent judicial personages including the former Lord Chief Justice of England & Wales, Lord Woolf.
Returning to the UK at the end of the contract, I joined Wood Mackenzie, formerly a broker but now an unregulated, private equity backed, oil and gas consultancy. My role, as Head of Risk Management, was to help prepare the firm for a potential IPO – although in the end the firm was subject to a takeover bid on very acceptable exit terms for shareholders.
And so to PIF, the Public Investment Fund of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia – what a role! I was asked to build a compliance function to be commensurate with the nature, scale and complexity of the business. When I started it had 100 employees – when I left it had 1,200. Assets Under Management had ballooned, the Compliance Division had expanded from 1 employee to 28, and proper reportage was in place to both the Governor, C-suite management and the Audit & Compliance Committee.
I was also asked to be PIF’s representative on three international platforms – the Investors Advisors Board of the Softbank Vision Fund (in effect a Governance Committee for the Major Investors), the OnePlanet Sovereign Wealth Fund Climate Change Initiative (championed by President Macron) and the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds. I retired from my role at PIF after five years and returned to the UK.
After this successful career, I am now building on this experience and skillset to start a ‘plural career’. I am seeking non executive positions or advisory work rather than full time executive roles.