Natasha Vernier
Aug 3, 2023

Why your compliance team isn’t effective and how to improve

Your compliance team isn’t reaching its full potential.

That may sound like a bold statement. But after listening to many compliance teams’ pain points, frustrations, and desires, we’re convinced most teams aren’t operating as effectively as they could.

If you’re a compliance leader, you’ve seen the issues. Simply checking off a list of controls isn’t enough in today’s regulatory landscape. Rigorously testing those controls is essential to find issues and show wary regulators and stakeholders that controls are actually effective.

But despite endless testing efforts, compliance teams feel stuck in a Sisyphean struggle, spending all of their time fighting constant “fires,” but seeing little pay-off from their work. It’s no surprise that over 50% of compliance officers are burned-out by their work.

The real question is this: how do you break this pattern?

The key for compliance teams to make long-lasting, sustained improvement in their compliance programs is to develop razor-sharp clarity on the purpose and objectives of testing.

Ask yourself: do you have team-wide alignment on the “why” behind all of your testing? Most teams don’t. This needs to be a top priority if you want your compliance team to be effective.

In this guide, we break down what this means in practice for your team. This is the first installment in a series of resources for compliance leaders and teams to improve how they operate.

Why compliance teams struggle to be effective

Most compliance teams will drastically improve their effectiveness by thinking and operating more in an outcome-focused manner.


For the vast majority of teams, testing is a reactive response to the most recent compliance “fire.” Second Line analysts get a series of individual cases along with a review checklist. They want to get through those cases and checklist as quickly as possible, so they can move on to the next review.

But here’s the problem, analysts rarely have a strong understanding of the purpose of their review or how testing results should translate into impact. In our experience, though many teams are swamped by testing, they cannot explain what their testing is supposed to achieve or how they will use their testing results.

Without an outcome-focused approach to testing, teams miss the forest for the trees in their work. They only focus on getting rid of operational backlogs.

This pattern is all too common, causing compliance teams’ impact, efficiency, and productivity to suffer in significant ways:

Put simply, testing shouldn’t be a checklist or a sanity check - it should give you answers to specific questions and help you drive next steps to achieve real results.


Compliance leaders should ensure there is a clear path from testing to recommendations for improvements, and then to actually making sure those improvements happen.


If your testing objectives and intended outcomes aren’t crystal clear, your compliance team is not operating effectively.

The good news is that you can take steps today to fix this!

How to unlock your team’s potential

To adopt an outcome-focused approach to testing, compliance leaders cannot just react to the latest issues. The first and most fundamental question to ask is this:

What do we need to always know on an ongoing basis?

Most teams need to check that all regulatory and policy requirements are met all the time, and that all controls going beyond requirements are working as expected. This is baseline continuous testing, and your team should understand the purpose of these reviews and the importance of the results.

After this ongoing testing is established, compliance teams can set other testing objectives. An effective approach is to ask:

What are our top 3 questions to answer this quarter?

Testing should be designed to gather results for those specific questions. For example, if the business is launching in a new market, the compliance team should know that reviews are aimed at identifying potential control weaknesses related to the new activities and expansion.

Compliance leaders should set priorities for each testing category to guide appropriate action. Not all testing is equally important - for example, a breach of regulation requires more immediate and severe steps than a procedural failure, and teams should be clear what the expected response to each should be.

Organizing other testing processes around this framework will keep your compliance team outcome-focused:

Cable’s all-in-one financial crime control effectiveness testing platform uses this same framework to help compliance teams operate at their fullest potential. Cable serves as compliance leaders’ first port of call to see exactly what matters most across their compliance program.

Recent Posts

Your compliance team isn’t reaching its full potential.

That may sound like a bold statement. But after listening to many compliance teams’ pain points, frustrations, and desires, we’re convinced most teams aren’t operating as effectively as they could.

If you’re a compliance leader, you’ve seen the issues. Simply checking off a list of controls isn’t enough in today’s regulatory landscape. Rigorously testing those controls is essential to find issues and show wary regulators and stakeholders that controls are actually effective.

But despite endless testing efforts, compliance teams feel stuck in a Sisyphean struggle, spending all of their time fighting constant “fires,” but seeing little pay-off from their work. It’s no surprise that over 50% of compliance officers are burned-out by their work.

The real question is this: how do you break this pattern?

The key for compliance teams to make long-lasting, sustained improvement in their compliance programs is to develop razor-sharp clarity on the purpose and objectives of testing.

Ask yourself: do you have team-wide alignment on the “why” behind all of your testing? Most teams don’t. This needs to be a top priority if you want your compliance team to be effective.

In this guide, we break down what this means in practice for your team. This is the first installment in a series of resources for compliance leaders and teams to improve how they operate.

Why compliance teams struggle to be effective

Most compliance teams will drastically improve their effectiveness by thinking and operating more in an outcome-focused manner.


For the vast majority of teams, testing is a reactive response to the most recent compliance “fire.” Second Line analysts get a series of individual cases along with a review checklist. They want to get through those cases and checklist as quickly as possible, so they can move on to the next review.

But here’s the problem, analysts rarely have a strong understanding of the purpose of their review or how testing results should translate into impact. In our experience, though many teams are swamped by testing, they cannot explain what their testing is supposed to achieve or how they will use their testing results.

Without an outcome-focused approach to testing, teams miss the forest for the trees in their work. They only focus on getting rid of operational backlogs.

This pattern is all too common, causing compliance teams’ impact, efficiency, and productivity to suffer in significant ways:

Put simply, testing shouldn’t be a checklist or a sanity check - it should give you answers to specific questions and help you drive next steps to achieve real results.


Compliance leaders should ensure there is a clear path from testing to recommendations for improvements, and then to actually making sure those improvements happen.


If your testing objectives and intended outcomes aren’t crystal clear, your compliance team is not operating effectively.

The good news is that you can take steps today to fix this!

How to unlock your team’s potential

To adopt an outcome-focused approach to testing, compliance leaders cannot just react to the latest issues. The first and most fundamental question to ask is this:

What do we need to always know on an ongoing basis?

Most teams need to check that all regulatory and policy requirements are met all the time, and that all controls going beyond requirements are working as expected. This is baseline continuous testing, and your team should understand the purpose of these reviews and the importance of the results.

After this ongoing testing is established, compliance teams can set other testing objectives. An effective approach is to ask:

What are our top 3 questions to answer this quarter?

Testing should be designed to gather results for those specific questions. For example, if the business is launching in a new market, the compliance team should know that reviews are aimed at identifying potential control weaknesses related to the new activities and expansion.

Compliance leaders should set priorities for each testing category to guide appropriate action. Not all testing is equally important - for example, a breach of regulation requires more immediate and severe steps than a procedural failure, and teams should be clear what the expected response to each should be.

Organizing other testing processes around this framework will keep your compliance team outcome-focused:

  • Establish communication expectations. Set clear communication expectations for different types of issues. At a minimum, each review must have a key takeaway. For example, if an analyst is testing for control failures, they should state whether a control is working as expected or not, and if not, what next steps are recommended based on the findings. This lets the 2nd Line focus on driving impact, not just redoing work.
  • Track controls in a single place. Compliance teams need to actually know what all of their controls are and why the controls are in place, so they can effectively test them. Create a centralized controls register to track your controls, where they fall in the framework, and testing results.
  • Communicate clearly about the purpose of Cable or other testing and assurance tools. Use this framework to explain how any testing and assurance tooling are intended to be used. Teams need to remain focused on testing outcomes and objectives to effectively leverage any technologies.

Cable’s all-in-one financial crime control effectiveness testing platform uses this same framework to help compliance teams operate at their fullest potential. Cable serves as compliance leaders’ first port of call to see exactly what matters most across their compliance program.

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