Conduct Risk Management

Book excerpt: Conduct risk is at the core of behavioural regulation, a new approach to regulating financial services, whose new agencies and public prosecutors have spread rapidly across the world. Its prosecutors intervene assertively to challenge financial service providers to show clear evidence of a new customer-centric approach, which understands and responds to the hidden drivers of customer behaviour. They use their unprecedented powers to levy very large fines and even to imprison wrongdoers - often for not taking precautions rather than for any active wrongdoing. Conduct Risk Management is a tool for recognizing, acting on, and predicting conduct risk impacts in regulated business. Conduct Risk Management sees beyond econometric and other 'box-ticking' traditions of risk management. Whilst protecting senior managers, it helps all staff to make positive use of conduct risk to promote behaviour the regulator will accept as 'good', as good behaviour is good business. The new conduct regulations personally affect every manager in financial services, and their suppliers, with new regulations making senior managers liable to imprisonment for failures in organizational conduct. Conduct Risk Management sets out plainly what practitioners need to know to understand the regulator's intentions, to prove compliance, protect competitiveness and maintain licence to operate.