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.

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