The role of the contingent workforce

2017/18 promises to be a fascinating and in many ways pivotal period for the Financial Services sector both in the UK and globally. Many Financial Services firms have been grappling for some time with how to properly adapt their businesses for certain key upcoming regulatory changes.

With regulators, in many instances, being handed powers under the relevant legislation and regulation to impose unprecedented levels of fines and other severe sanctions, every organisation must take seriously the implications of failing to implement proper systems and procedures to ensure compliance.

Key recent and upcoming regulatory changes set to affect the industry include:

-The EU’s Fourth Anti-Money Laundering directive;

-General Data Protection Legislation (GDPR);

-The Revised Directive on Payment Services;

-Solvency II;

-MiFID II; and

-Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD).

The sheer volume of regulatory change creates an increasingly challenging environment for businesses operating in the Financial Services sector through a combination of an underlying political motivation to adopt reform and a tremendous amount of uncertainty around the potential outcome of the reforms.

Some of the key challenges arising from these regulatory changes include:

-A lack of manpower and resources to cope;

-Dealing with constantly evolving change requirements and uncertainty (e.g. The unknown impact of events such as Brexit);

-The scale of the change required to consume existing resources and discretionary spend capacity; and

-Successfully navigating the complexity of the changes required on time and within budget.

General counsels and their in-house legal teams will either have primary responsibility for or be heavily involved in the change programmes required in order to deliver compliance with the various incoming regulations. Increasingly in-house teams are being asked to provide more for less. To deliver their compliance and change requirements to their boards and other key stakeholders in-house teams are increasingly looking to alternative delivery models such as Flexible Legal Resources in order to cost effectively obtain the expertise required to deliver their compliance and regulatory obligations on time and within budget.

Using a specialist contingent workforce like Flexible Legal Resources can help businesses meet their regulatory obligations on-time and within budget.

Read more articles on