Suited and Booted

Investment Compliance The ICMA Centre has a well established expertise in Investment Compliance. We have long recognised and advocated the importance of robust regulatory and compliance policies in financial institutions. This and the level of demand by banks and finance houses for well-trained compliance professionals has led to the Centre running a suite of regulation and compliance executive education programmes both in the UK and around the world. Our corporate clients in the UK include many of major banks such as Deutsche, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Commerzbank. Overseas we have worked with several Central Banks including Serbia and Montenegro, Dubai and Egypt, as well as large corporates in Spain and the Nordic region.

In certain sectors - notably banking, energy and telecoms - customers are exhorted almost continuously to consider ‘switching’ supplier. Organisational structures have been developed to facilitate switching and the strategy of switching tends to be strongly supported by the regulator in those industries. For example, over 40 UK banks and building societies now participate in the ‘Current Account Switch Service’ run by the payment service, Bacs. In the energy sector, there is an ‘EnergySwitch guarantee’ and the regulator (Ofgem) provides advice on how to switch to a new supplier, as does Ofcom for the telecoms sector.