From Compliance Beginner to Compliance and Ethics Best Practices Advocate – Part 2

by Andrijana Bergant

I. Compliance associations – as the ‘professional incubator’

In part one, I shared how I first started in the compliance profession and many of the early challenges that came along. As I was building the compliance professional network in Slovenia later, I became keen on identifying typical hardships of this job, building systems around such challenges and finding innovative ways to tackle each obstacle.  Finding the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics early on and becoming active in their broad compliance professional network was a great way for me to find the support of like-minded professionals. Taking part in exchanging knowledge with amazing professionals and learning solid compliance practices in an international environment have helped me to gradually spread effective compliance practices in Slovenia, too.

To this day I view international and local compliance networks as critical in professionalizing compliance as an independent business function, and establishing and developing further the compliance profession. This helps us enter into important conversations with other professional and business communities, as well as with regulators.

We also have an enormously  significant side benefit from being connected with peers in compliance associations:  it lightens our spirits and makes the work more enjoyable when we can share this with our peers.

For all these reasons I am a huge believer that no single compliance and ethics professional, no matter where you are in the world, should stand alone. By using compliance networks as hubs for your training and development, by mastering and consistently implementing professional approaches at your compliance work, you will actually create tangible value for a company or organization. In doing so, you collectively help enable good businesses to thrive and create so many other positive benefits in the broader economy and society. For this you can derive lifelong pride.

Along the way in my own career as an inhouse compliance officer and an advisor, I have learned that consistent learning, collecting and presenting objective and meaningful data, deploying professional approaches in compliance and ethics management, as well as finding your squad to cheer you on and give an example, are the most important success  factors in this line of work.

When you are managing a compliance and ethics program you need to operate highly professionally, be focused on the positive outcomes,  and build relationships in order to have positive impact, and to be acknowledged for your contribution. It’s so easy to lose focus with so much on your compliance plate constantly, or to go by unnoticed, if you are just buried under piles of formal documents, policies and procedures!

For awhile in the early start of my compliance career through 2008 and 2009, I had been a single compliance officer in a large international, publicly listed insurance company in Slovenia, not knowing much about how to establish an effective compliance and ethics program. There had  just not been anything there like that before. So, I felt I should get some kind of professional qualification to acquire more structured knowledge on the topic, and to find ‘my people’.

Luckily, my superiors at the insurance company were very supportive of my education in compliance, so I went on to google-search a ‘Compliance Conference’. The nearest were in London but mostly focused on narrow topics on regulatory compliance in financial markets. But what most frequently showed up as a search result was the SCCE – Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics. The annual conferences at that time were in the US only. I remember writing an email to SCCE about the Compliance and Ethics Institute in Chicago in 2008 and asking about the possibility of my attending from Slovenia. There was Adam Turteltaub on the other side of the ocean, responding very kindly and invitingly. So, there I went!

At my first SCCE conference in 2008 I finally saw, heard and experienced the profession. It was true. It existed! There are so many other people in compliance jobs!

Being one of few compliance officers in my entire country and in the region at that time felt quite lonely and disorienting sometimes. In Chicago at the SCCE CEI, I met other serious compliance professionals with decades of experience in compliance management, with mostly legal backgrounds, like me, and with impressive high-level corporate careers. This was a relief, because after that, I could stop worrying about ‘throwing away’ my previous career as a lawyer.

One of the first people I was lucky to meet in Chicago, besides Adam, was Roy Snell, SCCE’s CEO. He represented the SCCE and the conference in such a friendly way, it didn’t feel so strange, even if it was all so very new to me. I continued to be a regular visitor to annual Compliance and Ethics Institutes by SCCE and used the networking to hang out with other amazing compliance professionals, like Odell Guyton, Joe Murphy, Debbie Troklus, Sheryl Vacca, Art Weiss, Sally March, Dr. Andrea Bonime-Blanc, Gabe Shawn Varges… It’s honestly not an overstatement to say that to me these experts are true compliance legends. Many of them have written amazing books and created other invaluable professional resources. They are wonderful teachers and speakers and have contributed significantly to the development of compliance and ethics as a respected profession, globally. I am glad to say that many became precious friends, generously sharing their knowledge and experiences and setting the standard for my own professional work.

I am emphasizing  this so much to show how important it is to find your role models and mentors in this highly exciting and demanding field of work. This is especially true if you come from a more challenging environment, where overall corporate governance maturity is on a lower level and the compliance function is not yet well established in general.

Professional networks can offer reliable professional resources, and you get to meet a squad of people like you. In compliance and ethics, we are professionals in a separate field; our work mandate is unique as well. Our view and focus are long-term, while so many other interests and objectives in business are immediate or short-term. We go deep in finding and solving compliance and ethics issues to protect the business at the root, while many others like to keep it more on the surface to quickly move on, or sometimes even just pass by compliance and ethics issues entirely. We work mostly for the sake of ongoing support for the business to operate ethically, to have potential compliance threats identified and under control, on an ongoing basis. Many others in business may work just for the next job to be done and over, to mark the next short-term business plan and get the bonus. We also stand up for those who might be harmed if our company does the wrong thing – workers, customers, investors and the public.

We can and should build a compliance and ethics support alliance within the organization as well, and find allies among talented professionals in other divisions, enlightened leaders and senior business managers, which is in fact one of the essential strategies in establishing and maintaining successful compliance and ethics programs.

II. Establishing and building the local and national compliance and ethics network with EICE – The European Institute of Compliance and Ethics, Slovenia

“Why not call it a ‘European’ Institute of Compliance and Ethics, there isn’t one yet”, said my dear friend and respected colleague, Jerica Jancar, cofounder of EICE. She is a  former inhouse compliance officer herself and now an attorney, dedicated to many whistleblowers’ cases. Her idea to name the institute ‘European’ instead of just ‘Slovenian’, led us to lean into the broader international compliance network and make so many wonderful local and cross-border partnerships from the very beginning.

It was 2014 when we started EICE in Slovenia and I was just transitioning from Triglav Insurance Company to NLB d.d. (bank), to help establish the compliance integrity unit – an overall holistic and well-structured compliance function in this large banking group. NLB was under a lot of scrutiny at that time from the banking regulators, the government and the entire country, due to a scandalously large portion of non-performing loans that surfaced and defaulted at the peak of the last financial crisis. The bank was eventually bailed  out by the state in December 2013, but this came with tons of requirements from the European Central Bank and the Slovenian regulator along with massive ongoing public criticism.

Even my mother and her friends thought it was crazy for me to transition from the stable insurance company with a great reputation to this unpopular brand at the time. Doing this while just starting to develop the compliance professional network in Slovenia, felt close to being an impossible-double mission.

Together with Rok Praprotnik, director of the Compliance Integrity Centre at NLB and other amazing colleagues, we have built a highly professional and robust compliance management system, with the invaluable support of the president of the board at that time. Compliance at NLB has just grown and strengthened over time and has become a model for an effective and effective-practices-based compliance integrity program in Slovenia. In the meantime it also proved to be resilient over the test of time, considering occasional pressures, various shifts in the internal and external environment and other common challenges.

At the same time while serving as an inhouse compliance manager in a large banking system, I worked hard to constitute the local compliance network – EICE, the European Network of Compliance and Ethics, based in Ljubljana. Early on, we established the board of professionals with some of the most experienced and senior colleagues from the insurance and banking sector. It was critical for the credibility and success of the association to have this strong foundation with other dedicated professionals on board from the start. We held the launch event in November 2014, with close to 50 participants, working with IEDC-Bled School of Management, which became our steady partner for the flagship international compliance conference in Bled. We had some visible representatives from regulators and many other experts in the field to witness the launch.

III. The first decade of the Slovenian compliance organization, EICE

To start with, EICE largely attracted members from the financial sector – banks, insurance companies and a few fund management organizations. This was mostly because at that time, the EU regulation required the financial sector companies to establish the compliance function and designate this key function leader. This was in the context of the post-financial crisis of 2008.

We started to organize small group meetings that worked on very basic questions, like what standard set of work tasks and responsibilities should be assigned to a compliance officer. Soon, we started our still popular and ongoing Compliance breakfasts, as a platform for dialogue on topics of common interest with other professions, regulators and the business communities. On these occasions we discussed topics like independence of the compliance function; organizational positioning in the context of internal governance and the control system; relationship between the compliance function and the regulators; practical approaches to compliance risk assessment and compliance audits; and the relationship between the compliance function, the legal function, and internal audit. At present, we have been inviting professionals from sustainability, corporate security, technology and even psychology to exchange a variety of perspectives on important issues in the current business environment.

Initially, there had been difficulties around translating the very words ‘compliance’ and ‘officer’ and other terms in the field of compliance and ethics from the English language. The space was also full of different and sometimes opposing ideas about the role and job responsibilities of the compliance function.

So, in 2016 EICE took on an initiative to translate the first ISO standard on compliance in general (there had already been one on anti-bribery compliance), 19600: Compliance management systems — Guidelines (2014) into Slovene. We wanted to make sure that the basic compliance terminology was established in the local language, as some of the terms that we were already using just started to stick well in practice. We put in quite a bit  of effort to advocate for this with the Slovenian Institute for Standardization (Slovenia’s ISO representative) and succeeded. It became an official translation, and it was an important example of how much words matter.  (Of course, 19600 has since been replaced by ISO 37301, which provides for certification of compliance programs.)

In terms of professional advocacy, another example where EISE succeeded was contributing many suggestions as part of the consultation process for transposition of the EU Whistleblowers’ Protection Directive into the national law during 2021 and 2022.

As a local and a niche organization in a small country like Slovenia, we knew from the beginning that we needed to align with other like-minded professionals within Slovenia, the broader European sphere and the region of the Western Balkans. So, we quickly connected with the banking and insurance associations and many business communities in Slovenia and around the region, to exchange expertise, research findings and good practices. This also created a network of organizations that help create a broader audience for our flagship international conference – the Bled Compliance and Ethics conference and the messages that conference was sending.

Another network in which EICE takes a lot of pride is ENFCO – European Network for Compliance Officers, initiated by German colleagues from BCM – Berufsverband der Compliance Managers, and established through already existing friendly ties with our  Slovene  compliance association (EICE), the Austrian (OCOV), the French (Le Cercle de la Compliance) and the Greek compliance association (ASCO), as the first five members. Today, ENFCO connects 21 organizations around Europe, with several in the admission process. The main activities of ENFCO, in which EICE contributes, is an annual survey, a white paper and the ENFCO communication/ambassadors’ group, where promotion of the compliance profession and creating a knowledge base for European compliance professionals are central.

Looking back now at 11 years since establishing the Slovenian compliance association, EICE, these are the main take-aways:

1. A niche compliance association in a smaller country needs to do the same amount of work as the large ones, for much smaller impact and with many survival challenges. However, if leveraged in cooperation with networks of like-minded professionals, our voices are echoed, and small steps add up to larger effects.
2. It’s honorable and sometimes necessary to start with volunteer work. Soon though, even a non-profit organization, like a small compliance association, needs to have a sustainable business model, with a steady source of sufficient funding. This is the only way to avoid getting drained, to serve your audience in a professional manner, create a reliable support environment and sustain the professional community long-term.
3. Through compliance associations and building ties within the professional network, locally and internationally, you get to meet not just some of the best professionals and thought leaders in the field, but also amazing personalities and purpose-driven people, with an amazing variety of backgrounds. I have made some wonderful friendships through the compliance profession around the world, which remain to this day.
4. The words like compliance, compliance officer, whistleblower, etc., are very telling in translations to national languages and can dictate future development of the profession and shape perception of stakeholders about this field.
5. Professional advocacy can sometimes be like a drop of water on a concrete floor, but eventually with repetition and persistence it makes game-changing results.
6. One person can make a positive impact in the broader environment with just an idea in which one firmly believes and puts tons of dedication. And then, a friendly connection between two or three who share this vision can create an entire movement, which can stretch beyond just one country or set of objectives and is carried forward by new generations.