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.