Leading answers

MiFID is broadly in place and in the brief lull before the expected next round of market-wide change management, precipitated by the credit crunch, Compliance Monitor editor Timon Molloy spoke to Antony Whitehouse , Head of Compliance in London for Calyon, the French corporate and investment banking arm of the Crédit Agricole group, about the business of regulation and the tactical and strategic risks and challenges he faces.

The Calyon headcount in London stands at just over 1,000. “These are predominantly front office staff,” says Whitehouse, “a lot of the back office and other support functions are based in Paris.” How many work in compliance? “We have a budgeted complement of 16, which currently includes some temps.” A separate Financial Security Department of four takes care of AML and fraud and there are others with responsibility for client onboarding. “Formerly the Client Verification team were part of Financial Security but now sit in Operations.” Whitehouse believes that his team, which has regulatory oversight of the Calyon London branch, and ‘Crédit Agricole Cheuvreux’, the group’s equity broking house in London, may be less well resourced when compared to others in the peer group: “We’re slightly lean because we operate on a legal entity rather than a group basis for compliance in the UK.” For instance, Crédit Agricole’s asset management arm and the Asian broking business, which also work out of London, are serviced by their own compliance departments. “We therefore don’t achieve the same economies of scale that others that operate a centralized approach to compliance do.”