Compliance training myths

by Seona Knight July 2, 2020

Winning compliance training

Will your staff love or hate it? I've been creating and rolling out compliance training for over 15 years. You could say I've a fair amount of experience – time to quash a few myths!

Compliance is dull

A statement I've heard many times. It's funny, as I never thought compliance was dull. I always enjoyed working operationally in risk (for fintechs and gambling firms). I saw the police investigations, counter-terrorism and dark-web aspects as exciting learning and investigation opportunities. Yes, courses full of legalese and detailed definitions can bore the socks off most of us.

But here at Frisk, we use storytelling and fresh, simple graphics to make learning with our e-courses entertaining as well as effective. For a start, we make sure that legal definitions are written in plain English and paired with lots of real-life examples. Our courses are packed with interesting visuals and role-based scenarios. These scenarios breathe life into the training. It's really essential that staff identify with what the course says as 'relevant to them and their role'. If they learn about something they might really encounter, it will be a game changer for compliance training.

Staff will hate it

Sometimes staff arrive with the bias that compliance training 'really sucks' (pardon the slang). They've gone into the detail before at other firms. It's time to change this mindset by keeping training varied.

A good way of getting beyond this is to roll out the more detailed courses to your new starters, who often arrive with great enthusiasm. Later on, take them through the shorter 'bite-size' video explainer packs as refresher training. Don't just give them access to a continuous 5-minute video. Staff don't like it. Break your video up into sections and pepper the course with questions, scenarios and challenges. This keeps your people engaged throughout the learning experience. (See the next point on keeping content varied.)

Content never changes

Staff will begin to despise your training if the content never changes. There's nothing more frustrating than being asked to repeat the same course over and over again. You can just about get away with repeating a training pack once (if you change round the questions). Although this is not ideal, and I personally would not advocate it.

Plus, auditors don't want to see the same 'cut-and-paste' training being rolled out by every client they audit. They're far more interested in whether a risk-based approach is applied. This means understanding your risks, who might encounter those risks, and focussing training on these 'role-based' areas. A good way to do this is by developing risk-based scenarios that plug into key parts of your training and versioning these by 'staff role'. You might do something like this:

What is money laundering? – Easy to understand definitions + relevant 'role-based' scenario + question.

Basic version + Advanced version (advanced version has an increased number of questions, scenarios and stricter criteria).

Of course, this is just one aspect of a training pack and there are many other points to cover. The key is just don't just take the scenarios 'out of the box'. Adapt the scenarios to fit your risks and those faced by different teams. Then provide different versions of your training to these teams.

Keep changing it around too. Monitor the reports your officers receive (money laundering, information security and whistleblowing), then adapt training to incorporate these scenarios.

It's time to get 'buy in'

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