Compliance leaders your regulator will trust — and your business will follow.

We focus on senior compliance, regulatory and risk leadership: Chief Compliance Officers, deputy and divisional CCOs, regulatory and government-affairs counsel, BSA/AML and sanctions officers, Chief Risk and internal-audit leaders, Chief Privacy Officers and Data Protection Officers, and heads of ethics, conduct and ESG. We place these roles both inside regulated companies and within the compliance, regulatory and white-collar practices of law firms.

Regulated industries where compliance is a board-level concern: banking and capital markets, fintech, payments and crypto, healthcare and life sciences, energy and industrials, and technology and data. The regulatory regime — BSA/AML, SEC/FINRA, HIPAA, FERC, GDPR/CCPA — shapes the brief far more than the job title, which is why we scope every search around the specific regulators and rules the role must answer to.

Yes. Standing up a compliance function for the first time — often because a licence, an investor, a regulator or an enforcement action demands it — is a distinct kind of hire. The candidate must be comfortable building a programme from a blank page rather than inheriting one, and able to demonstrate the authority, resources and independence the DOJ's Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs expects a credible function to have. We weight programme-build experience accordingly and help founders and GCs scope a role that fits the stage of the business, not an oversized big-company template.

We test for ownership, not exposure. The questions are whether the candidate has personally led an examination, managed a consent order or remediation, responded to an enforcement matter, and built a working relationship with the relevant regulator — rather than supporting those events at a distance. We benchmark the brief against the DOJ ECCP's expectations on authority, resources and reporting line, read credentials such as SCCE's CCEP alongside lived experience rather than in place of it, and take references from people who have seen the candidate operate under regulatory pressure.

Compensation for CCOs and senior compliance leaders varies widely by sector, company size and regulatory exposure — a bank's financial-crime lead, a healthcare CCO and a fintech's first compliance head sit on very different curves, and the personal-liability profile that the Yates Memo sharpened now factors into the package. We benchmark each search against published market data, including BarkerGilmore's compliance and legal compensation studies, and against what we see live in the market, so the offer is competitive for the seniority and risk the role actually carries. We give you a defensible range rather than a single figure pulled out of the air.

Compliance is a small, scrutinised market where the strongest leaders rarely apply to advertised roles, and where the wrong hire carries genuine regulatory and personal-liability risk. A generalist sees a title; a legal-and-compliance specialist reads the regime. We know which AML lead can also handle sanctions, which privacy counsel has carried a global programme, and which CCO is ready to own the board relationship — and we map the whole market rather than working a rented list.

Senior compliance leadership — CCO, CRO and equivalent board-facing roles — is typically a retained, confidential search, which is how we run the most sensitive mandates. For other regulatory and risk roles we discuss the engagement model that fits the seniority, confidentiality and timeline of the hire. We are transparent about scope and fees before any search begins.

Yes, and most senior compliance searches are confidential by necessity — a regulated business rarely wants the market to know its compliance leadership is changing, and the strongest candidates are quietly employed elsewhere. We approach passive candidates discreetly and protect the identity of both sides until each is ready to proceed.