Philostrategy

The Value of a Necessary Evil

[Reading Time: 3 minutes]

Over the past few years, I have been polling compliance professionals around the world, anonymously, of course, on how compliance and risk management are treated by their senior management within their organizations.  Consistently and overwhelmingly, the preponderance of responses has fallen on the A side:

The truth is that, whether we acknowledge it or not, a focus on compliance and risk management has always been a hard internal sell.  Although compliance professionals are partly to blame for that, I believe most of the Continue reading →

Performance+Compliance: The Business Challenge of the Day

[Reading time: 6 minutes]

As the twenty‐first century unfolds, new and higher stakeholder expectations challenge organizations to achieve performance goals and increase shareholder value while at the same time meeting increased regulatory and compliance standards.

In the eighties, companies realized the strategic significance of human resources and a revolution in management development broke out. In the late nineties, technology and connectivity triggered the phenomenon known as globalization.  Each wave brought about enormous opportunities for economic growth and development.  However, September Eleven and the unprecedented corporate ethics meltdown of the early years of the new millennium revealed that fast change is leaving many gaps behind.

It is a fact that technological innovation has helped streamline business processes and lower costs.  On the other hand, however, issues in areas such as data security remain only partially addressed.  As for us humans, we seem to have learned how to organize ourselves a little better.  However, in general, we are still struggling to work collaboratively across international boundaries, remain creativity‐challenged, and keep Continue reading →

Ten Years of Futility?

[Reading time: 2 minutes]

Monday February 4, 2002, exactly 10 years ago today, was my first day of work as Compliance Officer for Remesas Quisqueyana, Inc., a money transfer company then headquartered in New York City.  Like many other non-bank financial institutions in the United States, Quisqueyana had recently -on January 1 of 2002, to be precise- become governed by a new set of regulations enacted after the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001.

After ten years in the trenches, a reasonable amount of experience under my belt, in my opinion, I feel qualified enough to start this blog in which I intend to recount everything I have experienced within and without the trenches, opine about the acts and omissions of industry stakeholders, and offer to anyone willing to receive it advice on strategy, tactics, tools, techniques, methodologies and secrets for success in the compliance and risk management domain.

I intend to be provocative, controversial and even irreverent, simply because that is my style. And that is my Continue reading →