Image: As one of the world’s eight designated Systemically Important Financial Markets Utilities, the Options Clearing Corporation has what some might charitably describe as a heightened compliance profile. But thanks to the work of Chief Compliance Officer Richard Wallace and an enterprise-wide effort to build a world-league compliance program, the OCC doesn’t strive to just meet current regulatory requirements, it lives by a set of internal expectations that exceeds the mandatory.
Bill Coffin
Posted inEthics & Culture
Ethics, Compliance, and GRC: A Foot on Both Banks
Ethics & compliance is one thing, and governance, risk & compliance is another, and yet, both seem to overlap significantly. When considering how often compliance issues begin as ethics issues, Editor Bill Coffin wonders what can be done to ensure a more seamless integration of ethics into compliance, governance, and risk management.
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
Pale, Male, and Stale
The call for greater boardroom diversity is not merely a matter of political correctness; it’s a matter of modern business planning, and most of all, a matter of regulatory compliance. And yet, despite the strides being made here, there is still much more ground to cover, and progress seems to be awfully slow in the arrival. CW Editor Bill Coffin asks: What’s going on?
Posted inInternal Controls
Chariots of Fire
Hoverboards were this holiday season’s must-have present, but ongoing product safety concerns, patent infringement lawsuits, and even a regulator raid at a prominent electronics industry tradeshow all point to a product category that has been rushed to market in more ways than one, constituting a compliance failure that is as widespread as it is serious.
Posted inAnti-Bribery
2015 Interactive Timeline: A Year of Transparency
Whether it was the Swiss leaks scandal, the European Parliament’s formal adoption of the 4th Anti-Money Laundering Directive, or a movement to require multinational corporations to publicly report financial information on a country-by-country basis, 2015 was a year in which transparency became a watchword across Europe. Take a look at “the year that was” through an engaging interactive timeline published by the Financial Transparency Coalition.
Posted inBoards & Shareholders
Remember When David Bowie Went Wall Street on Us?
Image: In 1997, just before the music industry was about to be turned upside down by a Black Swan-level of remarkable circumstances, legendary rock artist David Bowie issued bonds on his future royalties, earning a handsome payday for himself, and managing to sidestep a financial cataclysm in the making. Was he just lucky, or was the Thin White Duke practicing some next-level risk management?
Posted inEthics & Culture
Game of War
Image: When it comes to video games, there are violent games, games that are objectionably violent, and then there are games that actually manage to cross an ethical line in the sand. So when CW Editor Bill Coffin’s son asked for a game for Christmas that hit that third category, you can imagine the discussion that followed. It wasn’t pretty, it’s still not resolved, and it brings to mind the ongoing business costs of making bad ethical decisions, even years after the fact.
Posted inEthics & Culture
The Mast Brothers Meltdown
For years, Mast Brothers, a brand of high-end, artisanal bean-to-bar chocolate, has proven to be an unlikely success story, making small batches of expensive chocolate bars from its humble operation in the heart of the hipster world—the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. But when Dallas-based food writer Scott Craig took the Masts to task in a four-part expose that accused the brand of being less authentic than it has claimed, what resulted was an intense public debate over the nature of chocolate making, the honesty of Mast Brothers, and what it means to be straightforward and transparent with the public, even when the public might not know enough to ask questions about the products it’s paying for through the nose.