David Walker-Sherriffs, Group Head of Financial Crime and UK MLRO

My alarm goes off:
I don’t set one. I have a 3 year old who doesn’t fail to go off at 6.30am. And if he doesn’t wake me up (which basically never happens), my wife’s alarm will at 7am. I’ll usually get in for 8.30am.

What are you responsible for:
I’m responsible for ensuring that CMC is in line with regulatory and legal obligations in terms of financial crimes, as well as ensuring that we are protected against laundering and other crimes. As leader of the team I deal with escalations and high volume situations.

Best part of the job:
For my industry – financial crime – in a lot of bigger companies you usually end up focusing on a specific aspect of the job – so market abuse, AML or policy writing, for example. 

At CMC, it’s so much more varied, you’re constantly learning, you’re inputting into new technologies and ways of working and you cover lots of aspects of the job. Then, of course, there’s the fact that you’re helping the police with investigations of various sizes. I probably have the most interesting job in the company.

Most proud of:
That I have gone from joining the team to leading the team and that I’m now the approved person on the FCA register for the team.

I’ve also had a large amount of involvement in 2 or 3 really large FCA investigations where action has led to us helping victims of crime. When you do your job well you really can make a difference.

Why CMC?
They want you to have work life balance, so I pick up my son every day from nursery and it hasn’t once been an issue. Usually I’ll log back on in the evening, but they’re really progressive in terms of flexibility and they trust you to get the job done.

The other real positive is that if you want to change something in a CMC system, you can get things done really quickly and efficiently and senior management will listen and support you. In other organisations, it would take a year or so to get changes made. That’s really refreshing.

My typical day:
There really isn’t a typical day for me. With my role, it’s important to react to incidents really quickly as time is so critical, so your plans often get thrown out as you focus on an important incident that comes in.

After work:
At the moment, I go home, pick up the boy, give him a snack, bathe him and that’s me done. Very occasionally I’ll play football with the CMC Team on a Thursday.