Profit and Loss – Jan.15th, 2016
ACI Launches ELAC in the USA
ACI – The Financial Markets Association has launched its E-Learning and Certification (ELAC) portal in the US to help promote ethical behavior in the fixed income, currency and commodity (FICC) markets.
ELAC is an interactive teaching and testing tool designed to allow individuals and their employers within the financial services industry to learn, test and monitor their understanding of ethical codes of conduct. ACI says that this will help ensure sustainable adherence to these codes of conduct.
To help achieve this aim, the system provides interactive illustrative scenarios that will be regularly updated to demonstrate how these codes of conduct can be applied to specific situations in the FICC markets.
Additionally, ELAC subscribers can earn Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Points and maintain a Personal Accreditation Rating (PAR) by completing market practice modules, self-assessment questions and by contributing to the actualization of ethical standards as markets evolve.
Although the ELAC portal uses the ACI Model Code as a standard code with which to educate and test users, it has an open framework that is designed to allow any code of conduct to be uploaded onto the system.
Speaking at an ACI event in New York yesterday to announce the launch of the platform, Marshal Bailey, president of ACI, stressed that ELAC could also be a useful attestation tool for financial institutions
“Right now if firms want to let staff go because they have broken internal rules it’s difficult. They have to keep paying them while the decision is disputed because they can’t prove that these individuals had the necessary training regarding these rules.
“ELAC enables firms to say that their staff have had the necessary training, that they have attestations that their staff have done the training and that they’ve been tested on it. It means that they have the Management Information Systems (MIS) that prove that, not only has this individual been trained, but that their entire team has been trained, the entire division has been trained and every division around the world has been trained in exactly the same way,” said Bailey.
Conversely, Bailey noted that there has been a lot of demand for the ELAC portal from individuals trading on the desks who want to ensure that they fully understand and are compliant with the relevant codes of conduct and expected ethical standards at a point in time when individual’s actions are under a great deal of regulatory scrutiny.
ACI says that it plans to grow the number of signed up ELAC user licenses to 10% of the people working in the wholesale financial markets by the end of 2016, 25% in 2018 and 50% in 2020.