Experienced compliance professionals are in despair: "Shocking pay cuts"
If you occupy a compliance role in the financial services industry and are hopeful that 2026 will be an improvement on 2024 or 2025, then good luck. Many compliance professionals do not seem positive about the year ahead.
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We spoke to five senior compliance professionals for this article. Their verdicts, imparted anonymously, were the same: the compliance profession is being starved of investment, and it's being felt in compliance jobs and pay.
"The business is in control," said one long term compliance professional. "Senior managers from the business don't allocate budget to compliance, which is always seen as a cost. It's the first place to be squeezed and we are always under a lot of pressure. You must always be right - if you're wrong you're fired!"
Following years of squeeze, the market is now awash with senior compliance professionals touting their wares. They are finding in the process that it is a buyer's market.
"I am shocked at how salaries across compliance have dramatically dropped," reflected one executive director who left his job after a decade late last year. "Roles that used to pay six figures, now pay £90k, for double the responsibility."
Another compliance said roles that once paid £100k are now paying £80k and that compliance has been particularly hard hit by cost cutting. "Most firms are offshoring their compliance processes and using AI solutions for monitoring, so there's a lot less demand for people," he added.
The laments come as Goldman Sachs is reportedly using Claude to automate its compliance and accounting roles. They also come as the Trump presidency has adopted a more lenient regulatory tone and as Chancellor Rachel Reeves has promised to cut capital requirements and red tape in the UK. "The regulatory environment over the last five years put costs and burdens on the firm that we now won't have going forward," said Goldman Sachs' CEO David Solomon in January.
Solomon was referring primarily to capital requirements, but regulatory headcount is falling too. Citi said in January that it was 80% of the way through its program to remedy is regulatory failings following its 2020 consent order. Citi has spent $260m+ to solve its regulatory data issues alone and hired both risk and compliance staff and hundreds of data professionals and thousands of technologists to controls in its investment bank. When the remedial program is finished later this year, Citi CEO Jane Fraser suggested some of those staff will be let go again.
Compliance professionals who are struggling to stay afloat said their profession needs reframing. "I have always faced off to the business," said one. "My mantra is "I help your business make money and avoid regulatory scrutiny and fines" - I make money and reduce risk (saving money)."
Another said he's looking at contract roles instead. "When you look at the personal liability involved in senior compliance roles and you compare that to the pay, it's not worth it," he said, referring to UK regulations making senior compliance personally liable for regulatory failings. "It's much safer to be a contractor now."
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