THE POST-COVID NEW NORMAL
We’ve already entered the era of the “new normal” here in the midst of COVID, but one has to wonder how things will change on the first day after the pandemic is officially declared “over” with the dawn of a new, new normal.
We all know that the scourge of the novel coronavirus formally began on March 11, 2020 when the World Health Organization declared it as such. However, none of us can accurately predict when it will be over.
THE OFFICE Office buildings have more than a few vacancies these days. Large cities such as London, New York City and other financial epicenters have been particularly hard hit… New York’s largest tenants, like Google, WeWork and JP Morgan, are MIA, and the upper class is now fleeing the confines of dense living for the suburbs.
The contract between society and business has changed forever. The office will become a convening place where you get teams together, but the work will be done in people’s homes.
THE TECHNOLOGY Operational resilience has been on full display and reached new heights in the wake of the pandemic.
Knowledge sharing amongst compliance officers, made possible by technology, evolved to a sustainable cadence and workflow that enabled standardization of regulatory practices. Development training and departmental meetings, although mostly virtual, have allowed compliance officers to rise to the challenge of telework. Technology itself, buoyed by advances such as artificial intelligence, has enabled compliance officers to move beyond basic lexicon analysis of e-Communications and enabled simultaneous multi-lingual interpretation and assessment of conversational nuance.
THE REGULATIONS Although reporting requirements were relaxed at the onset of the pandemic, upholding compliance measures that thwart, identify and halt market abuse has been an unwavering constant.
Financial criminals have demonstrated themselves to be equally creative and have cleverly masterminded COVID-based phishing scams and other illegal measures to circumvent accepted financial practices. By Day 1 of the post-COVID new normal, market abusers will be on pause, regrouping to craft new schemes that bypass even more stringent compliance regulations. That is, at least until financial criminals come up with new schemes that bypass detection.
THE FUTURE Financial firms are the stewards of our economy; when they falter and post strings of losses, there is a pronounced ripple effect.
Here’s where things become ironic. Compliance teams, bloated though they are for many firms, were the saviors of many banks and, indeed, many economies, because they figured out how to stabilize remote work when it was unexpectedly thrust upon the world back in March.
As stated by CUBE in April 2020, compliance is not going away. It may change forms, but it remains essential as a critical business function, “Now, more than ever, businesses should be looking at ways to automate their compliance systems and implement smart, technological solutions that reduce human
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