Want a job in finance? Have some prior experience in sales and trading? Try applying to ICAP – it looks like they’ll be strengthening their risk and control functions in the style of JPMorgan.
Last week we reported that JPMorgan only had one compliance professional working with its CIO team – the unfortunate Jason Hughes. Today’s FCA Final Notice on ICAP’s Libor misdemeanors suggests the broker dealer was similarly slim when it came to compliance staffing.
While ICAP’s brokers were busy calling each other Lord Libor and making illicit payments for Libor fixes, the FCA reports that ICAP’s compliance team was completely ineffective. In one case, a broker was based in a country where there were no compliance staff at all. In other cases, compliance staff were situated far away from brokers and brokers’ managers ignored them.
Like JPMorgan, ICAP has tried to make amends. During today’s conference call, CEO Michael Spencer said a lot of risk and compliance staff had been added since 2010. Unfortunately, ICAP is rather smaller than JPMorgan and spokeswoman Brigitte Trafford told us hiring to date has totaled a mere 25 people (thereby doubling the size of the previous team). There will be more hiring, said Trafford, but ICAP won’t be “doing a JPMorgan.”
Nonethless, ICAP’s troubles may inspire hiring across other broker dealers too. Gail Danvers, managing director of recruitment firm PSD Group said broker dealers often have tiny compliance teams compared to investment banks (allowing for their diminutive size). Now that ICAP’s been burned, that could change.