J Vint: Alex, in your opinion, what are the current compliance concerns facing global financial institutions today?
A Laumans: They’re obviously manifold, but I would say that the biggest challenge stays regulatory changes in various aspects. On the one hand, they’re not thought through sufficiently. There’s a very big political eagerness to respond to public pressure. You can see that easily with the German elections at the moment, and by relation to emotions you could say the results remind us of… progress is bad where people will limp[?] in order to fit the bad. It’s really hard to consider the implementation. There’s a lack of definition, there’s a lack of expectations, there’s no case law yet. Much of the supporting regulation is overdue, it’s very much overdue, and a lot of changes, more localised. So, where you have, on the one hand, a universal banking model, a global supervisor, taking a local approach is very difficult, it makes it very hard to control operations in an appropriate manner.
A second thing that I see increasing at the moment is how to deal with the secrecy with the privacy rights in light of very broad regulatory audits and subpoenas that we sometimes receive. From time to time it feels slightly like a fishing expedition where you just get a request to provide all information of potential relevance for periods of five or even ten years requiring an organisation to look back at data that is only available in film format, made very difficult to sort everything out, listen to all the tapes, and, at the same time, making sure that you respect the individual’s rights not to disclose his or her personal data. But that’s, of course, just two of a very long list of challenges that we’re currently dealing with, but two that stand out.
J Vint: So that touches on the significance of the importance, certainly on data management within these organisations. Just touching on one of your points, how has the ongoing collaboration of regulators either assisted or hindered in the compliance process?
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Alex Laumens will be speaking at the Information Governance and eDisclosure Summit, which will take place from 14 - 16 May, 2013 at the Lancaster London Hotel, UK. For information, please email enquire@iqpc.co.uk or call +44 (0) 2307 368 9300. More resources can also be found at: http://www.legaliqonline.com/
