Banking Regulatory Compliance and Legal Risk Training Course

Course overview

Banking legal and compliance teams must convert dense regulatory obligations into controls that can withstand supervisory scrutiny, internal challenge and operational change. A missed conduct requirement, weak customer due diligence record, poorly governed product approval or incomplete regulatory notification can trigger enforcement action, customer remediation, capital impact and reputational damage. This course equips professionals to identify legal risk early, interpret banking requirements in context and document defensible compliance decisions across retail, corporate and investment banking activities.

Participants examine the regulatory architecture governing banks, including prudential supervision, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing, conduct of business, data protection, sanctions, consumer protection and outsourcing. They learn to build obligation registers, map rules to business processes, assess inherent and residual legal risk, design preventive and detective controls, test evidence, manage regulatory change and escalate material breaches. The programme also develops practical judgement for advising product, operations, risk and senior management teams without treating compliance as a purely checklist-based function.

Delivery combines instructor-led legal analysis with realistic bank scenarios, control-design workshops, peer review and structured case discussions. Participants work with a regulatory obligation inventory, legal-risk assessment matrix, control-testing plan and breach-escalation template. By the final day, each participant produces a bank-specific legal and regulatory compliance action plan that identifies priority obligations, ownership, control gaps, evidence requirements and implementation milestones for use on return to work.

The course is designed for experienced banking professionals who work at the intersection of legal, compliance, risk, operations, products or audit and need a more systematic way to manage regulatory obligations.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Interpret banking laws, regulatory rules and supervisory guidance using a structured applicability analysis
• Build a regulatory obligation register linking legal requirements to business owners, processes and evidence
• Conduct a legal-risk assessment using inherent-risk, control-effectiveness and residual-risk scoring
• Map anti-money laundering, sanctions and conduct obligations to customer lifecycle controls
• Design preventive and detective compliance controls with defined owners, frequencies and test evidence
• Plan regulatory change implementation through impact assessments, gap logs and accountable action plans
• Prepare a material breach escalation record with facts, legal analysis, remediation and notification decisions
• Produce a 90-day banking compliance action plan for a selected business area

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Banking Compliance Managers — who must translate regulatory obligations into monitored business controls
• In-House Banking Lawyers — who advise on regulatory interpretation, product governance and reportable events
• Operational Risk Managers — who assess legal-risk exposure and challenge control design
• AML and Financial Crime Officers — who need to connect CDD, sanctions and transaction-monitoring duties to legal requirements
• Internal Auditors — who evaluate whether regulatory controls are designed, evidenced and operating effectively
• Product and Operations Managers — who must implement compliant customer journeys, disclosures and escalation processes

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should have at least one to three years of experience in banking, financial services compliance, legal, risk, audit, financial crime or operations. They should already understand basic banking products and customer lifecycle processes, such as account opening, lending, payments, trading or complaints handling. Familiarity with the terms AML, KYC, sanctions, conduct risk, internal controls and regulatory reporting is assumed. Participants should be comfortable reading policy documents and using spreadsheets for simple registers and action tracking. No law degree, programming ability, specialist legal database subscription or prior regulatory investigation experience is required.

Training methodology

An instructor with banking legal and compliance experience leads focused sessions on applicable rules, supervisory expectations and decision frameworks. Participants then apply the frameworks to bank scenarios involving onboarding, product approval, sanctions alerts, complaints, outsourcing and control failures. Small groups build obligation registers, score legal risks, define controls and challenge each other's evidence standards. Daily debriefs compare alternative legal and operational responses. The final workshop converts course outputs into an individual 90-day implementation plan aligned to the participant's own bank, function or control area.

Course outline

Day 1: Banking regulation, legal duties and risk ownership

• Banking regulatory architecture and the roles of prudential, conduct and financial-crime supervisors
• Sources of legal obligation: statutes, regulations, rulebooks, guidance and enforcement precedents
• Three-lines model and the allocation of legal, compliance, risk and business accountability
• Legal-risk taxonomy for banking products, customers, channels and third-party arrangements
• Rule applicability analysis by entity, jurisdiction, customer segment and activity
• Regulatory obligation register structure and minimum data fields
• Policy hierarchy, delegated authorities and evidence of governance decisions

Workshop: Participants build an initial obligation register for a digital deposit and payments product, assigning applicability, owners and evidence sources.

Day 2: Financial crime, customer protection and data obligations

• Risk-based customer due diligence and beneficial ownership verification requirements
• Sanctions screening obligations, alert disposition and escalation documentation
• Transaction-monitoring governance, suspicious activity reporting and record-retention duties
• Consumer protection rules for disclosures, fair treatment, complaints and vulnerable customers
• Market conduct and conflicts-of-interest controls in banking sales and advisory activity
• Data protection principles for customer data, lawful processing and cross-border transfers
• FATF Recommendations as a benchmark for financial-crime control design

Workshop: Teams analyse a high-risk customer onboarding case and produce a documented CDD, sanctions and escalation decision.

Day 3: Controls, product governance and third-party legal risk

• Converting obligations into preventive, detective and corrective control objectives
• Risk and control self-assessment techniques for legal and compliance risks
• Control design specifications: owner, frequency, population, threshold and evidence
• Product approval committees, target-market assessments and conduct-risk sign-off
• Outsourcing due diligence, contractual clauses, exit planning and ongoing oversight
• Records management and audit trails for legally significant customer and governance decisions
• Control testing design using samples, walkthroughs, exceptions and root-cause analysis

Workshop: Participants map a lending-process obligation to controls and create a control-testing sheet with evidence criteria.

Day 4: Regulatory change, breaches and supervisory engagement

• Regulatory change intake, horizon scanning and applicability triage
• Impact assessment methods for rule changes affecting systems, policies, products and training
• Gap analysis and remediation planning with accountable owners and due dates
• Materiality assessment for compliance incidents and potential legal breaches
• Breach investigation records, legal privilege considerations and fact preservation
• Regulatory notification decisions, communications governance and remediation commitments
• Supervisory examination preparation, document requests and management response tracking

Workshop: Working from a new conduct rule and an incident report, participants create an impact assessment and material-breach escalation pack.

Day 5: Integrated legal-risk governance and workplace application

• Residual legal-risk reporting for management committees and boards
• Key risk indicators and key control indicators for banking compliance oversight
• Issue management, root-cause analysis and sustainable remediation verification
• Using ISO 37301 principles to structure a compliance management system
• Basel Committee expectations for governance, risk data and operational resilience
• Challenge techniques for business rationales, control attestations and risk acceptance requests
• Ninety-day implementation planning for priority legal and regulatory risk improvements

Workshop: Participants present a bank-specific legal and compliance action plan containing priorities, controls, owners, evidence and 90-day milestones.

Tools & standards covered

Microsoft Excel, ISO 37301 Compliance Management Systems, FATF Recommendations, Basel Committee Core Principles for Effective Banking Supervision

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions