In this interview we talk to a compliance recruitment expert whose experience in the field is unparalleled. David Symes, the principal of Compliance Recruitment Solutions, began as a compliance officer in the 1980s when the UK enacted the Financial Services Act. Thirty years on, he is still at the peak of his profession.

David Symes' experience in compliance goes back beyond the first "white-collar recession" in 1990-93. An accountant by trade, he entered the compliance job market more or less by accident. He was an auditor at Banque Indosuez before joining Guardian Royal Exchange to help set up its first ever compliance department. In 1996 he set up Compliance Recruitment Solutions and although 2020 has been a terrible year for recruitment so far, CRS is soldiering on. This article takes the form of a question-and-answer session.

Q: When did compliance begin in the UK?

A: Before the Financial Services Act 1986 and the Big Bang, compliance officers were only to be found in the UK at stockbrokers and investment banks.

It was only in April 1988 (‘A-day’) when the original Securities and Investments Board (SIB) and the five self-regulatory organisations (SROs) obtained their powers that proactive compliance came in. Before then, the Department of Trade and Industry had policed the City of London and not that well. After A-Day it was a criminal offence to perform financial services without authorisation. That very week of A-day I started in compliance at the age of 25 and it was a temp contract at first, would you believe it.

Q: What kind of people became compliance officers in those days?

A: As today, firms recruited lawyers and accountants from the outside, but if the person came from within the company it was often the company secretary ("the keeper of the company's conscience"), the head of internal audit, sometimes even the financial director or the head of legal. The last two of these were senior enough to be able to say no if the board offered them the job and they didn't want it.

Q: Was it easy to acquire a job in compliance back then?

A: Yes. In 1990-3 came the first proper white-collar recession. Lawyers and accountants from the Big 8 (it was not yet the Big 4) were being laid off all over the place, but it didn't touch compliance because there were so few of us.

I, for example, was number two in a FTSE 100 group compliance office of four. Four years later, that had doubled to eight and there were 30 divisional compliance staff – a marked increase on nothing in 1988.

Q: After 11 September 2001 the money-laundering reporting scene exploded because financial firms were taking money laundering seriously for the first time, but let's jump to just normal compliance – what was happening to that?

A: It was still growing but slower, then we hit the post-dot-com downturn of 2001-03. At that time, the hiring in ordinary compliance (not money laundering) slowed down. Some compliance staff were made redundant, although there were no mass redundancies.

Q: And what about AML/KYC jobs?

A: At that time, as we were saying, there was an explosion in AML/KYC remediation because of 9/11 and AML jobs grew in number generally.

Q: Did you see big demand for compliance people at the software firms?

A: Our firm didn't see much demand – the firms only wanted the IT techies or sales types, not subject-matter experts unless at the very top

Q: What happened in the market after that?

A: It was plain sailing until the last hiccup – the collapse of Lehmans. On the sell side, compliance jobs in investment banking were going lower a year before the collapse. The buy-side kept going till the summer of 2008, although conversely the sell-side picked up faster after the 2008-9 crisis than the buy-side. However, all areas of compliance suffered redundancies.

Q: Compliance officers often move from private banks to other sectors of finance and vice versa, so what are your observations about people moving between different lines of business?

A: If you're a compliance officer it's hard to go from a retail independent financial advisor [IFA] to an investment bank, although interestingly enough you can go the other way round. The reason is that you're going from the complex to the simple. No investment bank is going to take someone from an IFA. However, sometimes a wealth manager will seek out an investment banking compliance expert because they are more au fait with the complexity of the market.

Q: What's it like for a compliance officer who leaves his profession to spend five years in a consultancy like ACA Cordium but then after five years wants to go back into the market?

A: It's hard. If he goes into consultancy he can make more money, especially if he goes into a BD (business development) role, but this is basically sales unless you’ve a very good networker and many compliance people find that hard.

Q: Back to the crisis of 2008. When it came, many things must have happened in the compliance job market. What took place?

A: It was an absolute disaster. All jobs on the books were cancelled when Lehmans crashed. Compliance officers who were our clients became our candidates. The sell side started recovering first and then the buy side showed signs of recovery six months later. Then 2010 was a very good year and 2011 saw a slowdown in hiring, but no redundancies. The markets were worse in that year and that always affects the buy side because assets under management (AuM) go down. One year on, the job market picked up.

Q: What has happened since?

A: Brexit has caused a lot of uncertainty in financial services. Between 2016 and the beginning of 2020 Brexit had an impact but was not critical, although the merry-go-round certainly slowed down. Candidates stopped moving. If they joined a new company that offshored itself, they didn't want to be last-in-first-out so the compliance job market slowed down considerably. The start-ups, many of which were Chinese or backed by Chinese money, stopped coming – why, after all, would the Chinese come to London when the City was losing its passport? They saw little point in using it as a place for their head offices. The only exceptions to this rule were home-grown FinTechs, but (unfortunately for the recruitment business) many don't pay recruitment fees and they don't pay high basic salaries – they'd rather offer share options and sexy benefits like table football and croissants on Friday!

Suddenly, in the last six months of last year, political uncertainty grew to record heights and the job market was even poorer. In my experience, January of this year was the worst month for recruitment in 25 years. Then we had the 'Boris bounce' in February, which generated some business, just in time for the end of the world as we know it.

Q: What about international movements of compliance people?

A: In the early 1990s as regulatory regimes grew around the world, Brits could go abroad e.g. Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. Business was done in the same language and they had similar underlying legal systems, so they could go there and get jobs. It is also the case that Australian, New Zealand and South African lawyers and accountants could get jobs here, subject to work visas and dependent on how well the economy was doing.

So in the mid '90s Brits could spread out all over the world. Then in 2002-03, Dubai took off and from 2005 on we saw a vast number of compliance officers going out there (and later to both Qatar and Abu Dhabi).

Q: What kind of compliance officer do you get in Dubai?

A: Mainly Brits and Aussies but you also get lots of expats direct from the Indian sub-continent. Islamic rules apply of course. The last GCC (Gulf Co-operation Council) conference I went to was six years ago. The dinner in the evening had to be dry!

* David Symes can be reached on +44 207 330 6966 or at david@compliancerecruitment.com