The game that he plans to break up the monotony is to try to guess how many alerts will greet him when he logs in. That’s pretty much the only thing that changes day-to-day is the number of alerts. Check out the PDF or visit us for more information about Life of a Compliance Officer at https://bit.ly/3fyBrrW

1. HTTPS://WWW.SHIELDFC.COM/
COMPLIANCE
OFFICER'S LIFE
WITH
FRUSTRATING DAY
One of the things that still amazes me about the field of regtech is
how similar the needs are no matter who the client is, where
they’re headquartered or who is managing their compliance
programs. It’s striking to see how compliance officers around the
world face the exact same problems and struggles in their day-to-
day. At Shield, we spend a lot of time talking to compliance
officers to explore and learn how we can best support them. Let’s
break it down by diving into a day in the life of a compliance
officer.

2. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A COMPLIANCE OFFICER
To bring a level of personalization to this story, we’re going to call
our compliance officer, Tom. Monday is pretty much just like
Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday. Friday is a little different
in that Tom and a few of his co-workers typically grab a takeaway
(takeout) from their favorite deli next door to the firm and have
lunch together. But, for the last year, in the COVID era of remote
work, they haven’t kept up with the tradition, so all the days of the
week tend to blur together.
Each day begins the same way for Tom. He wakes up, pours a
coffee, and settles down in front of his terminal. His inbox
contains a few dozen emails with various requests to investigate
some suspicious trades, provide status updates on some of the
cases he’s working, and confirm his attendance at a couple of
meetings later that day and that week.
Today, he’s greeted with 102 alerts; it’s going to be a busy day after
all and he had guessed hoped that the day’s alert tally would be
78. Alas, wishful thinking. He makes his way through the alerts as
he makes his way through his lunch. Even working from home,
there’s not really sufficient time to take a proper break and lounge
through lunch.
HTTPS://WWW.SHIELDFC.COM/
KEY CHALLENGES
A day in the life of a compliance officer is an exercise in patience,
monotony – and frustration. Although the task of reviewing,
assessing, and scoring each alert for its inherent level of risk is
mundane, alert saturation takes its toll on a person. On the
surface, his task seems simple, but it carries great responsibility.
Email is mindless – alert review is anything but.

3. ONE POSSIBLE SOLUTION
Next, Tom puts in a search query and requests to harvest all the
financial transactions tagged to Trader A. There’s a lot of them.
More than usual. That in of itself is a flag. But therein lies the
challenge: he put a request in to get access to the transactions
because he can’t actually see them.
HTTPS://WWW.SHIELDFC.COM/
Sounds easy right?
Well, here’s the catch, all these data sources are stored in separate
systems, with a different IT admin in charge who of course won’t
give him access to this vital information so easily, needs approval
and so on and so on. Not to mention the 100’s of alerts Tom needs
to review in the hopes of finding a smidge of a scenario that can
be turned into a real investigation.
So what do you do about it?
For years, the approach financial firms have taken to compliance,
regulations and their requirements have been tactical, “cross that
bridge when you get there” mindset. Buying systems and licenses
with every requirement that arose – for example if the regulation
said to record calls, they bought a system just for that and the list
goes on as the communication channels grew.
This created an IT disruption called data silos.
From a compliance standpoint, at Shield, we placed all that data
into our compliance platform using AI-powered correlation
engines. And now a Compliance Officer like Tom will have a
visualized workspace to dig through relevant data and inevitably
create effective investigations.