Here's a summary of Sophie's TOM Talks on recruitment activity for Compliance and Finance Crime at the end of 2024.

Recent Market Trends:

• Privacy Reforms, whilst more modest than expected, have led to an increase in privacy opportunities. These have predominantly been in Financial Services, Energy and FMCG at advisor levels but also senior management roles.
• AML Reforms - intended to simplify and clarify the current regime, modernise the regulation of digital currency and virtual assets – have now also expanded to include high risk entities such as law firms, professional services and real estate agents, so called “tranche 2”.

Recruitment Predictions

Increase in demand for financial crime skill sets, due to increase in number of entities that Austrak will be regulating. Specifically, this is expected to be across:

• Global law firms – likely to recruit heads of AML to drive global AML policy within in Australia
• National law firms – majority of predicted demand as likely to need to hir 2 or 3 AML professionals to build, monitor and deliver programs
• Smaller law firms – likely to rely on consultancies
• Real estate – it’s currently unknown what their approach will be
• Banks – likely to be hiring in AML policy, risk assessments, CDD & rule optimisation
• Austrak – to cover all the new entities that need regulating!

Salaries, which remained flat in 2024, are expected to increase with high demand from Jan 2025. These salary increases for tranche 2 are unlikely to be to quite the same extent in tranche 2 entities as the Big 4 banks, albeit it budgets the former are currently unclear.

Opportunities in Fraud are expected to increase with the new Scams Act.

If you would like to find out more, get in touch with a member of the Audit, Risk and Compliance team.