How much will external compliance consultants cost this year? Day rates up to £1200

Management and professional services consultants are likely to increase their rates for providing compliance staff on a fixed term contract basis to London’s financial institutions and brokerages this year, as a greater amount of legislation is continually imposed in Britain.

The London operations of recruitment consultancy and HR outsourcing specialist Robert Walters has stated that financial institutions, including banks and lenders, as well as electronic brokerages in London have found that senior compliance officials are in such high demand that companies are resorting to hiring external contractors from professional services consultancies and independent consultants.

Robert Walters’ report, called “The Salary Survey” showed that day rates for consultancy and contract positions in certain senior compliance roles will rise by 20% to £1,200 per day, and middle-management or internal compliance roles will rise by 7.7% to £700 per day.

Trading activity monitoring is becoming a costly business

Day rates for contractors with over six years experience in trade surveillance or communications surveillance – two aspects which have required substantially higher amount of human resources this year due to measures put in place to monitor and stop rate manipulation by inter-bank traders by use of messaging services – are likely to rise by 8% to £650 per day according to the report.

Regulators are now even investigating the possibilities of monitoring social messaging applications such as the WhatsApp accounts of interbank dealers as well as the institutional terminals used to transmit messages internally and between institutions.

Almost exactly a year has passed since the Swiss National Bank removed its 1.20 peg on the EURCHF pair, the aftermath of which caused institutions and liquidity providers to assess credit risk, and this year, compliance consultants hired to perform credit risk and stress testing roles will rise by 6.3% to £850 per day.

It is clear that London’s bank and non-bank institutions are very much committed to ensuring that they maintain the top quality reputation worldwide, and are willing to commit fiscal resources to it by paying higher day rates for specialist consultancy services.

The downside is that whilst banks which handle a large proportion of interbank FX order flow such as Barclays, HSBC and RBS may well have to pay these rates, it comes at a time when the bank sector is looking toward prioritizing the Asia Pacific region over London, and after a year of regulatory fines and class action litigation running into the billions and a year of lower volumes and sweeping redundancies.