Specialise or Generalise?
It may sound simple enough to pick a niche under the umbrella of anti-money laundering (AML) Compliance, but it’s actually challenging. The world of compliance, even the subset of AML Compliance, is quite vast, and the field is creating new positions every day, either out of ingenuity or necessity. Under AML Compliance, you could seek to be an analyst, an investigator, a trainer, a programmer, and these are just job functions. You could also consider a particular aspect such as sanctions, risk management, KYC/CDD, FinTech, and well, you get the picture.
There is yet another dynamic to navigating the world of AML Compliance when deciding on a career of choice. The size of the company matters. If you work for a large organization, such as a conglomerate, it makes a lot of sense to drill down to a specific area of expertise, ensuring that you are able to thrive. This approach may not plausible in most small firms. Why? Most small firms can’t afford to hire one Compliance Specialist, much less a team to manage all the potential specializations. For these companies, the compliance specialist has to know it all, do it all, be it all, and just check all of the above boxes. You would have to be versed in the entire compliance program to a sustainable level based on your small firm employer’s risk and resources.
I can imagine there are downsides to each side of the coin. As a professional working for a small employer, it is quite difficult keeping up with everything that’s happening and impacting an employer’s industry, as well as the jurisdiction to consider. For a specialist, you’d not only have to be well-versed in your area of choice but also have a basic understanding of the entire program, as no aspect of the program works in total isolation.
The good thing is these two starting places help each other out quite often. If a specialist offers regulatory compliance consulting services, he or she can usually provide their services to the small firm to address a particular concern or issue. In contrast, the well-rounded AML Compliance Professional can keep us on our toes on the vast amount of ever-changing information in the compliance world, enough to spark interest and concerns to stay relevant.
