Morgan McKinley's 2020 Compliance Salary Guide outlines remuneration and trends in the workplace for temporary and permanent compliance people all over the United Kingdom.

Recruitment of permanent compliance people was consistently busy for a number of years up until last year, but in 2019 there were far fewer regulatory projects and natural recruitment attrition was at a low ebb, causing banks to hire fewer people. On the whole, Brexit had a profound effect. Despite the fact that the UK had voted to leave the European Union as far back as 2016, the ruling Conservative Party was still delaying that departure with all its might, while the Liberal Democrat Party was unapologetically promising to ignore the poll and vote against Brexit and the Labour Party was planning a second referendum on the same subject, promising to campaign for the overturning of the first referendum. Against this background of uncertainty, people who might otherwise have applied for compliance jobs waited for the outcome of the general election in December, which returned a strongly pro-Brexit Conservative Government and settled the matter once and for all.

Perm and temp

In the permanent market in particular, large wholesale banks significantly hired fewer people in 2019, having used the majority of their recruitment budgets in other areas over previous years. That said, it has not all been doom and gloom; there has been much recruitment at the mid-senior level on the part of medium-sized financial institutions, as well as those with branches in London which have been trying to 'Brexit-proof' themselves.

In a number of ways, the temporary compliance recruitment market in 2019 mirrored the market for permanent appointments. The biggest influence on it came from the uncertainty surrounding Brexit, leading a number of firms to vacillate over whether to make appointments. That being said, firms undertook some hiring projects when they needed to acquire interim workers in new jurisdictions, hiring people to set up companies in different locations and implement regulatory regimes and anti-money-laundering and/or know-your-customer (AML/KYC) projects. For these projects, the firms hired only temporary compliance people who were the closest matches for the vacancies in question, whereas in the past organisations had been more lenient. Alongside the lower levels of hiring in comparison with recent years, firms found many posts incredibly difficult to fill because there were few candidates for them.

Top 3 permanent compliance jobs

• Compliance monitoring officer (AVP/VP - Investment Banking/Asset Management)
• Compliance advisory manager (Asset Management)
• Financial crime monitoring/assurance