The post-COVID new normal | Shield

The PostCOVID New Normal Shield

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.

We do not know what’s next – but we do know that financial services and efforts to keep moving our economies forward will continue, in whatever form. The big question is, what will regulatory compliance, financial responsibility and the industry look like on Day 1 of the post-COVID new compliance normal?

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.

In Europe, the story is a little different. In France, Germany, Italy and Spain, office buildings are once again operating, albeit at about three-quarters occupancy.

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.

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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. Federal and state agencies initially allowed compliance workers to catch up with the overnight shift to telework, giving officers time to come to terms with new policies, how to interpret them, enact them and abide by them. It took time, but financial firms showed their resilience and compliance officers demonstrated their creativity.

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.

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