Regulating against White‐Collar Crime in the Financial Services Sector

As the forces of globalisation gather pace, national economics are becoming more internationalised and interdependent, and the power of individual nation‐states is being diminished in relative terms. Increasingly, individual countries are less able to control their national economics. One consequence of these developments is that regulatory structures and processes are becoming more internationalised and a variety of modes of global governance is emerging. These shifts in regulatory power are apparent in the growing influence of bodies such as the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS); the Financial Action Task Force (FATF); the International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO); the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); and the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Similar shifts are facilitated through networks of specific agreements between professional and industry associations, and state‐sanctioned self‐regulatory organisations (in particular through Memoranda of Understanding — MoUs). However, although there is a trend towards growing regulatory harmonisation, different national and cultural influences impact upon national systems of regulation, and in international contexts these values may conflict. Given these developments, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how regulatory structures and standards function in different countries. Two elements that are constant in nearly all jurisdictions are the acknowledgement of public‐interest concerns in regulatory systems and the need for compliance with regulatory standards. This paper considers the issue of regulating against white‐collar crime in the financial services sector in the contexts of promoting regulatory compliance and the representation of notions of the public interest.