How to get a compliance job in banking and financial services

• Compliance professionals are the like the police of the banking industry – they exist to make sure that banks follow the regulatory rulebooks.
• Compliance jobs can be stressful, but the compliance profession has risen in importance and prestige since the financial crisis.
• Law can be a starting point for a job in compliance, but banks run training programs for it too.

In financial services, the compliance function serves two key purposes. Firstly, it ensures that the institution operates within all applicable laws, rules, regulations, and standards. Secondly, it creates and maintains a “compliance culture”.

The compliance team ensures that an institution operates within the rules and regulations applicable to its specific lines of business. You could say that compliance operates as an internal police force, monitoring behavior and tracking adherence to specific rules and regulations.

Laws are typically created by government bodies and administered and enforced by government agencies. These agencies create rules that firms must obey. The interpretation of these rules requires both a thorough understanding of the law and an appreciation of the practicalities of the businesses affected. The compliance function provides this interpretation.

Compliance is also responsible for the establishment and maintenance of an appropriate compliance culture within a firm. That involves not only line-by-line review of the rules and regulation, but also the education process – as well as the creation, along with senior management and the Board of Directors, of a compliance program for the entire company. This notion of a “compliance culture” goes well beyond employee training. It’s about influencing behavior and setting expectations so that adherence to rules and regulations becomes second nature.

The importance and influence of the compliance function within financial institutions has grown dramatically since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. While compliance has always been important, the explosive growth of regulation as a result of the weaknesses exposed by the crisis has brought compliance needs into sharp focus.

Jobs available in financial compliance

There are a number of jobs and roles available in compliance.

Know Your Customer (KYC): KYC due diligence is conducted for both new and existing clients and investors. It’s an ongoing process, as the origins of investors’ funds can change over short periods of time. There are two key objectives to each due diligence exercise: a) the identification and verification of investor’s identity and b) determining the ultimate purpose of the investment.

Anti-money laundering (AML): AML programs are a key to compliance. AML staff review the details about new and existing clients in terms of their locations, their relationships with others, and the laws applicable to them. The key elements of AML include training staff to spot money laundering issues, client due diligence, the designation of an AML officer, independent testing, and governance documentation (policies and procedures).

Compliance Risk Management: Financial institutions of all kinds require governance processes to be carried out and monitored to reduce the risk that regulations are infringed. Compliance risk managers look at everything from the compliance reporting to roles and responsibilities within the compliance function, the disclosure of information about transactions, insider trading prevention, secrecy and privacy, recordkeeping of transactions and complaints, and potential conflicts of interest.

Business Conduct: These jobs are about embedding a firm’s culture of compliance and code of ethics into specific business practices. Adherence to the specified requirements is constantly reviewed.

Compliance monitoring, documentation, and reporting: Information flow is a key part of the compliance process. If you work in monitoring, documentation, and onboarding, your job will involve keeping an eye on how clients are being onboarded, on transaction flow and on policies and procedures to maintain an effective control environment. Technology has made these roles much easier: compliance monitoring professionals now have easy access to data about trades, clients, conflicts, and market practice. Their role is to aggregate, report, and interpret this data. They also manage the information flow to the board of directors and senior managers, ensuring that they’re fully aware of the compliance risk profile at the heart of the bank.

Career paths in compliance

There’s no specified background for a career in compliance, but it’s also not uncommon for people with a background in law, business, accounting, or finance to move into compliance jobs. If you have a legal background, for example, you might find it possible to immediately apply your knowledge of relevant securities laws and regulations.

If you’re not coming from a legal position and are looking for an entry-level compliance job, you might find that you start out in the “control room”. The control room is responsible for the maintenance of the information “wall” between the public side of the institution dealing directly with investors and the private side which has access to non-public, confidential information.

Other entry-level compliance jobs include screening clients for criminal activity (KYC), ensuring that anti-fraud checks are carried out; performing due diligence on payments to make sure funds aren’t being used to finance illicit activities (AML); or providing information to regulators and law enforcement agencies.

Ultimately, these functions are all managed by senior compliance managers, but there are plenty of junior opportunities too. The nature of your job in compliance will depend partly on the kind of firm you work for. For example, in a small institution like a startup hedge fund, a compliance officer could wear several hats including customer and payment screening, managing people and writing policies. If you have a compliance job in a big bank, your work is likely to be much more specialized.

Ken Weiller, a veteran compliance and operating professional with experience in both banks and the hedge fund industry, told us a few years ago that compliance professionals in hedge funds have become more prominent in recent years. “The compliance staff interacts regularly with the rest of the firm on multiple levels; by setting policies and being the point person for their implementations,” Weiller said, adding that compliance professionals in hedge funds have responsibilities spanning everything from approving and regulating employees’ personal trades to participating in decisions about the allocation of expenses to investors.

At many firms, compliance personnel are involved in daily trading/research meetings as well as being members of firmwide committees dealing with areas such as valuations and conflicts of interest, Weiller added.

What skills do I need for a career in compliance?

Read More: The skills you need for a career in financial services compliance

Compliance sits in an odd corner of financial services. Surrounded by finance and business types, compliance professionals are more like lawyers than anything else. The skills you need reflect that.

The core of the role is legal and regulatory framework around both the business you cover and the industry as a whole. The job is also unusually social for a middle-office role, as you'll be explaining complicated rules to everyone from new joiners to the board. That takes communication skills, and you'll be doing it while occasionally having to say no, which takes more delicate people skills. Increasingly, you also need to understand AI.

How is AI changing financial services compliance?

Read More: How AI is changing financial services compliance

Compliance is one of the roles in financial services most exposed to AI.

Compliance was built like a pyramid; a wide base of junior analysts gathering data and reviewing transactions and customer profiles, narrowing to a thinner layer of senior investigators and experts. That base is what can be, and is being, automated - the UK's Financial Services Skills Commission (FSSC) estimated in May agentic AI could take on 27% of regulatory compliance functions and 42% of compliance monitoring, for example.

FSSC doesn't expect mass job losses so much as a different job altogether, with compliance staff overseeing AI agents and critiquing their output. Adoption is slower than the anxiety suggests, as IT consultancy Wolters Kluwer found that only 12% of firms have a well-defined, resourced AI strategy.

Education & qualifications for financial compliance jobs

Read More: The qualifications you need to work in banking, trading, and more

Compliance holds a unique place in the banking recruitment ecosystem because it does not usually recruit finance graduates. When we analysed JPMorgan’s junior compliance personnel, for instance, we saw that a significant number studied law in some capacity (although not all). That’s a natural by-product of a less quantitatively focused profession than other roles in an investment bank.

There are a number of additional qualifications that can be done in pursuit of your compliance career, too. In the UK, there’s the CISI Diploma in Investment Compliance There’s also the International Compliance Association’s (ICA) Compliance certificate, which is also UK-focused, although not as widely recognized as CISI’s. The American Bankers Association also offers qualifications in the U.S., as does the Independent Community Bankers Association (if you want to work for a community bank).

Salaries and bonuses in compliance

Read More: Some compliance professionals are earning $475k+

Compliance jobs can be very decently paid. A 2026 salary survey from recruitment consultancy Barclay Simpson found that London-based compliance professionals can earn over £300k depending on field of expertise and industry. That tracks with what managing directors are paid globally. Pay can be even better outside of the UK, and specially in the US.

Bonuses, however, would be much smaller than what front-office professionals earn. As important as compliance is, it is not a revenue-generating part of the company.

Our 2026 Compensation & Lifestyle report found that compliance professionals enjoyed very decent work-life balance. Compliance professionals in our survey earned $171k on average in 2025, while working just 43 hours a week. Interestingly, they reported working less hours in 2025 than they did in 2024, one of the only group of bank staff who did so. Their hourly pay, however, was still low, below all of their colleagues but their peers in operations and finance.

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