Tag Archives: Mark Steward

Compliance, Culture and Evolving Regulatory Expectations

by Mark Steward

Keynote address delivered at the March 31, 2021 conference of New York University School of Law’s Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement, titled, Compliance, Culture, and ESG: How Companies Achieve Meaningful Cultural Change and Meet Evolving Regulatory and Stakeholder Expectations.

Highlights

  • The Senior Managers Regime (SMR) has changed the way firms allocate responsibilities, align those responsibilities to relevant controls and ensure oversight as to how these controls operate down the line.
  • The 5 Conduct Questions (5CQ), which start with ‘tone from the top’, are increasingly focussing on ‘tone from within,’ which requires every person in an organisation to be personally accountable and engaged.
  • Every employee of a regulated firm is subject to individual conduct rules, which impose broad obligations.
  • The SMR and 5CQ questions require firms to think about how a system or function might fail because of non-compliance, and they inject a sharper focus on conduct risk into the fabric of an organisation.
  • As demonstrated by enforcement cases, failures are not necessarily failures of compliance, but the consequence of choices made by individuals.

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Practical Issues in Financial Services and Securities Law Enforcement: A UK Perspective

by Mark Steward

Keynote Speech at New York University School of Law Program on Corporate Compliance and Enforcement – 31 March 2017

Thank you very much for inviting me here today. It is a great privilege to be here, listening to and participating in today’s discussions. I congratulate the New York University Law School for convening today’s program.

Opening

Conduct issues give rise to competing tensions within firms. Everyone can feel hard done by, whether justifiably or not. Firms complain about having to shoulder responsibility for errant staff; staff complain about being scapegoated; regulators and other authorities are blamed for not holding to account those who are supposedly ‘really responsible’ with the public too often feeling the regulatory outcomes do not fully attribute blame.I want to speak to you about today’s theme, the expanding scope of individual liability for corporate misconduct, from a UK perspective with reference to recent developments in the UK, especially the Senior Manager’s Regime which commenced operation just over a year ago. Continue reading →