Employment in Financial Services

There are prescriptive, sector-specific requirements, which apply to the remuneration of specified categories of employees or directors, and which apply in the asset management, investment services, banking, and insurance sectors.

Employers in these sectors are tasked with ensuring that the remuneration paid to material risk takers (individuals whose professional activities have a material impact on an RFSP's risk profile) or identified staff align with the RFSP risk profile.

There are detailed rules with technical guidance (emanating from EU law) specific to each sector, but at a high level they (to differing degrees) set out rules on; variable remuneration composition, ratios or other metrics to compare variable to fixed remuneration to ensure it is appropriate; malus requirements, which would allow the RFSP to cancel or reduce the employee's variable remuneration before it is paid out; and clawback provisions which allow RFSPs to recover variable remuneration after it has been awarded. It is important to ensure that employees' contracts of employment acknowledge that any variable remuneration will be subject to all regulatory restrictions and rules and may be clawed back in certain circumstances.

The CBI's 2014 Guidelines on Variable Remuneration Arrangements for Sales Staff also emphasise the importance of remuneration structures to have sufficient deterrents built into them (such as malus and clawback mechanisms) to avoid incentivising undesirable/risky behaviours from sales staff in the banking, insurance and investment services sectors.

Yes there are. They are:

• the F&P Standards;
• the minimum competency regime; and
• the IAF and SEAR (see question 1).

There are also sector-specific conduct of business requirements in legislation and codes, including the Consumer Protection Code 2012, the MiFID II regime, and other regulatory requirements applicable to RFSPs based on their industry sector that apply and deal with matters such as:

• error handling,
• disclosures to customers,
• acting in the best interests of customers; and
• complaints handling.

The CBI expects RFSPs to be open and transparent in their engagement, including concerning compliance with the F&P Standards and the Common Conduct Standards. While early versions of the IAF regulations and related guidance contained an obligation on a RFSP to report to the CBI if disciplinary action had been taken against an individual, the obligation was removed from the latest version of the draft legislation. The Guidance indicated that the CBI would expect that they would have already received relevant details as it provides that firms and persons performing PCF roles are required to report to the CBI where they suspect that a "prescribed contravention" may have occurred for the purposes of the CBI legislative framework and the CBI states that a breach of the Common Conduct Standards and/or Additional Conduct Standards is a "prescribed contravention" for these purposes.