Compliance and Car Maintenance

Imagine you’ve just bought a beautiful new car. It drives smoothly, gleams in the sunlight, and turns heads on every corner. For the first few months, everything feels effortless. But you don’t check the oil. You don’t service it. That small light on the dashboard? You ignore it.

The car still moves forward — until one day it doesn’t. The engine seizes, the repair bill is eye-watering, and what could have been prevented with small, consistent care has now become a full-blown crisis.

The same is true of your firm’s approach to the Money Laundering Regulations.

At first, skipping a step in a Client Matter Risk Assessment, relying on generic templates, or overlooking the need to revisit due diligence might feel inconsequential. The firm is still running, the work is being done, and nothing appears broken.

But compliance, like car maintenance, is about prevention. When CMRAs are incomplete, when FWRA findings aren’t reflected in daily practice, or when reviews are not updated, you create blind spots. And blind spots in AML compliance are costly.

Somewhere down the line, those blind spots become:

• A substantial risk to money launderers, who are adept at spotting weak firms.

• Regulatory scrutiny, as the SRA and others increasingly sample files and publish warning notices.

• Financial penalties and reputational damage, which often far outweigh the time and investment it would have taken to maintain compliance properly.

Just as no driver would knowingly run their car into the ground, no prudent firm should allow their compliance framework to erode. Yet the reality is, many do — not from neglect, but from the mistaken belief that “good enough” will do.

The lesson? It won’t.

Preventive care — whether for your car or your compliance — is far less costly than repair. Your Client Matter Risk Assessments are not paperwork to file away, but the daily service record of your firm’s culture of compliance.

At Alexander Christian, we provide independent, discreet support with:

• File reviews – ensuring your records reflect the care regulators expect.

• Look-back assessments – identifying risks hiding in plain sight.

• Remediation support – helping you course-correct before issues escalate.

Because in both motoring and compliance, it’s not the breakdowns you see coming that cause the most damage. It’s the ones you ignored until it was too late.