Most people coming into compliance roles think the job is about knowing the rules. It is — but that's maybe 30% of it.
The rest you learn on the floor.
Walk into any listed company compliance function and count how many departments you're actually dependent on. Finance, legal, secretarial, HR, auditors — the work touches all of them, and none of them report to you. If those teams aren't talking to each other, something falls through. Compliance in a listed company is a coordination problem as much as a legal one.
Then there's the group structure. A listed company rarely operates as a single clean entity. There are subsidiaries, associates, joint ventures — each sitting in a different jurisdiction, each with its own filing requirements and risk profile. What works at the parent level doesn't automatically translate down. You figure that out fast.
Documentation is the one lesson that sounds obvious until you've actually had to defend a position without it. If the decision was made verbally, if the approval happened over WhatsApp, if the rationale never made it into writing — it effectively didn't happen. Good records aren't bureaucracy. They're your only evidence when it counts.
Governance is the piece most people underestimate when they start. Filing the annual return is the easy part. The real work is board process, stakeholder disclosures, risk oversight, ethics frameworks — the structures that actually determine how decisions get made and who's accountable for them. That's where governance either holds or doesn't.
And none of it works well if you don't understand the business itself. The compliance professional who knows the law but doesn't understand the business model, the industry dynamics, or where the real risks sit — they're always a step behind. The ones who do understand the business are the ones who actually get things done.
The best in this field aren't just people who know regulations. They're people who understand how business, finance, and governance intersect — and can work across all three at once.
