Banks are spooked by Compliance

Really I should know because I use to work in a bank and have gone out to some interviews in banks which have their headquarters in third world countries with questionable compliance issues. It is an issue with all banks but the ones which are under intense scrutiny are the tiny banks on third world countries where the issue of compliance has not been taken seriously previously and are now scrambling to be acceptable to world financial institutions. Every bank that I know of has ramped up their compliance departments and the growth of jobs is increasing there. But the banks of the developing bank have become overly cautious about their hiring process and they ask an absurd amount of knowledge about compliance before even considering hiring you. As you well know there are always officers involved in checking two to three times whether something is in compliance before issuing something and still the lower staff gets blamed for things that should have been stopped by the departmental supervisors.

Although I understand that banks in the past have been lax with their compliance issues but now it seems that the pendulum has sprung to the other side as every decision made has the key feature of compliance in it and if it cannot pass the compliance test than the decision is abandoned. But I want to emphasize here that the past occurrence of loose compliance issues were not done by the rank and file and it was usually done or overlooked by the management as everybody was making money but with the current environment of money laundering and terror financing the main headlines dominating everything, the compliance monster has taken over or I should say consumed the entire banking industry (and other financial institutions as well).