- Chief Compliance Officer and VP of Legal Affairs, Arrow Electronics
By 
Neil Hodge2023-09-12T15:00:00
A banking boss’s decision to leak client details to a journalist is likely to cost the industry millions in new compliance checks as U.K. regulators prepare reviews into how banks treat people with extreme political views and whether they are subject to excessive and illegal monitoring.
NatWest’s now-former Group Chief Executive Alison Rose broke the most basic rule on confidentiality and told a BBC reporter that Nigel Farage—the U.K.’s face of Brexit and anti-immigration—had his bank account canceled because he didn’t meet the necessary wealth criteria.
Farage was a customer with Coutts bank, a financial institution that advises account holders be able to borrow at least 1 million pounds (U.S. $1.3 million) or hold £3 million in savings (U.S. $3.8 million) with it. Coutts is part of the NatWest Group.
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Just because Alison Rose received a public apology from the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office regarding the suggestion she might have violated the General Data Protection Regulation doesn’t mean NatWest could avoid sanction.
An independent review into how NatWest handled the closure of politician Nigel Farage’s Coutts account uncovered potential regulatory breaches by the bank that are on the radar of the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority.
The furor over NatWest Group’s decision to monitor and close the account of right-wing Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage—and then disclose the details to a journalist—has raised questions regarding whether other banks employ the same means to get rid of undesirable customers.
Top-of-mind issues addressed at Compliance Week’s Third-Party Risk Management & Oversight Summit, held June 3-4 in Atlanta, included safe deployment of artificial intelligence, assessing vendor viability and sustainability, understanding the role of procurement in risk ranking, the intersection (or lack thereof) between data privacy and cybersecurity, and many others.
Anne Morriss, co-author of “Move Fast and Fix Things,” advises compliance officers to tap into curiosity, communicativeness, and comfort with discomfort to build organizational trust, fast.
Regulators and government agencies often speak to the value of empowered corporate compliance programs to advancing their mission. Why not practice what they preach by empowering compliance among their own ranks?
