From the police force to crypto compliance: leading through people, beyond policy w/ Tom Edwards & Dr Steve Strickland

When we talk about Compliance leadership, we usually talk about rules: frameworks, controls, monitoring, testing. All important, all necessary.

But when you spend time with people who actually sit in senior Compliance seats, a different picture starts to form. One where the job is far less about writing policy and far more about people.

In this edition of Behind the Controls, I sat down with Dr Steve Strickland, Group Chief Compliance Officer at Copper.co, to talk about what really sits behind senior Compliance leadership.

A former police officer. Nearly two decades in uniform. A doctorate in economic crime. Senior roles across banking, auction houses, and now digital assets. On paper, it is a deeply technical career. But in reality, Steve’s story is about something much simpler: people. And about the 80% of the role that rarely gets discussed.

From the police force to digital assets

Steve did not start out planning a career in Compliance. He started out planning a career in policing.

“I came from a family of police officers. Father, uncle, grandparent. You name it. I thought I was a career police officer.”

He spent just under 20 years in the police, finishing his service with the City of London Police, working in economic crime. Alongside that, he completed a doctorate focused on economic crime.

In his final years, his work became increasingly international. Operating in a specialist niche of economic crime, he worked with governments, national FIUs, and central banks in higher-risk jurisdictions, from Nigeria to Ghana, Colombia, and Ukraine, running gap analyses on control frameworks, financial intelligence, and investigative capability.

The City of London Police may be geographically small, but, as Steve puts it, it “polices upwards, not outwards”, servicing businesses, banks, and regulators rather than neighbourhoods.

By the time he began thinking about his next step, Steve realised something important: he was already spending more time working with banks and regulators than with policing colleagues. That made the transition into financial services feel natural.

Barclays came first, leading anti-bribery and corruption for Barclaycard, before moving to Deutsche Bank, helping to rebuild anti-financial crime controls following regulatory scrutiny. Then Sotheby’s, as Global Head of AML and Anti-Financial Crime, where he built frameworks not only for traditional art markets but also for NFTs and crypto payments at a time when the space was still finding its feet.

From there, Steve naturally moved into the crypto and digital asset space. Today, he is Group Chief Compliance Officer at Copper.co, sitting at the intersection of digital assets and traditional financial services.

“Just like the pun: an ex-copper working for Copper.”

It’s a career that spans very different environments, but one theme has remained constant: people come first.

Compliance leadership: when technical expertise stops being the main event

“You’re hired for your compliance expertise. But when you’re the Group Chief Compliance Officer, that becomes secondary.”

Steve is very clear about this. At senior levels, the role shifts away from being the technical expert in the room and towards building a team of technical experts.

“Your biggest focus is building out a team of professionals in their own right.”

He has seen that play out very directly at Copper.co. Having built teams across six locations globally, from the UK to Hong Kong to New York and everything in between, Steve describes his current function as one of the strongest and most professional groups he has worked with.

“If you build the right team with the right people, my compliance expertise becomes secondary.”

That does not mean the technical side disappears. He still leans into investigations. He still keeps current with regulatory and industry developments. But the balance shifts:

“Probably 80% of my time is soft skills. Supporting people. Enabling them to do what they need to do. Coaching. Mentoring. At my level, it’s much more about managing relationships than making the compliance decisions. That still happens, but it’s not the main event anymore.”

It’s something we do not talk about enough. Early in your career, technical capability is everything. As you become more senior, your impact increasingly comes through others.

There is a story from Steve’s policing days that has always stayed with him. His first year in the police was his father’s last. Steve asked him if he was going to miss it. He said no, because he was no longer doing the job that he joined to do. His father had become a senior officer and was far removed from frontline policing.

That resonated with him. Steve still loves financial crime and compliance. It is part of his DNA. He is no longer hands-on in the way he once was, but he has found a different kind of satisfaction:

“When I see members of my team who progress, advance and develop their own careers, that’s where I get the real satisfaction.”

Leadership as an inverted pyramid

Steve sees leadership slightly differently. Most organisations picture senior leaders at the top. He sees it the opposite way.

“People say you’re C-suite, you’re at the top. No. I’m at the bottom.”

His role is to hold everything up, to remove blockers, to enable others to succeed. And when something goes wrong, the first question is not who failed:

“If they fail, the first question I ask is, what have I done?”

That mindset feeds into how he measures success.

“The true measure of success is when you’ve built a team so strong that you’ve made yourself redundant. If I walk out of here today and get hit by a bus, are they strong enough to carry on without me?”

It also shapes how Steve hires:

“I have no issue hiring people who are smarter than me. I’d rather be surrounded by experts.”

There is no desire to be the cleverest person in the room. The goal is to build a room full of people who do not need you to function.

The hidden cost of silos

One of the biggest surprises Steve sees across organisations is how entrenched silos still are. He shared an example from a previous role.

“The fraud function came to brief me on a case with around 80 separate counts of high-level, high-value fraud. I asked, ‘what about the SAR filings?’ And they said, ‘well, it’s fraud’. But every single one of those frauds also constituted money laundering. Because it was a fraud team, they were only looking at it through a fraud lens.”

Steve’s response has been to push for multidisciplinary thinking and omnicompetent teams. People trained across multiple disciplines. Teams that can flex based on demand.

He points out that siloed thinking is not always a symptom of big organisations. Sometimes it is actually a symptom of being too small.

“When you grow, you’re able to look at things in a more cross-functional way.”

Rather than building multiple teams of narrow specialists, Steve has favoured building smaller numbers of broader-skilled teams, where individuals are trained to a level of competence across different areas.

It is a model he first brought across from policing, influenced by the national intelligence model, where intelligence is used not just to investigate crime, but to manage people and resources. Each week, he would look at demand, volumes and resourcing, then flex individuals to where they were most needed.

The results were striking: performance per staff member doubled compared to comparable teams, every SLA was met, year after year, attrition fell below 2%.

The driver was not pressure, but variety.

“The more variety you can give people, the longer they stay. They don’t get stale. They’re developing and learning new skills.”

Influence, trust and doing the right thing

Nobody enjoys being told uncomfortable truths. Especially not by Compliance.

Steve’s approach is not to walk into a room and drop a verdict.

“Delivering messages is as much about selling as it is about delivery.”

He positions the issue, unfolds the context, and helps the person connect the dots themselves.

“If they own the outcome, it’s far more powerful than you imposing it.”

It is not about diluting standards, it is about influencing effectively. As Steve puts it:

“Compliance is not a function. Compliance is something everybody is responsible for. The function just helps people achieve it.”

That philosophy runs through how he thinks about culture. If you want people to raise concerns, policies alone will not get you there.

“It’s trust. Nothing more than trust. People need to know me. They have to trust me. They have to know that we’re in it together.”

When something goes wrong, he does not start with blame.

“The first question is not who’s responsible. It’s: what was the gap that allowed this to happen?”

He also believes organisations do not learn enough from smaller issues. Lessons learned should not be reserved for headline incidents. They should be part of everyday operations. For Steve, that mindset naturally extends into prevention at a very human level.

“Good people do turn bad. But there are triggers.”

Life events. Pressure. Stress. Burnout. You do not need to pry into people’s private lives, but you do need to notice when something changes. Sometimes that starts with a simple question.

“How are things going?”

That becomes even more important in a global, remote environment. Steve’s team is spread across multiple countries and time zones. He speaks to every direct report at least once a week. Often for half an hour. Often spending most of that time listening.

“It’s not necessarily about Compliance. I’m there when they need a cathartic release.”

Even on Teams, he says, you can sense when something is not right. But only if you create the space for it.

Underlying all of this is one non-negotiable. When I asked about personal values in high-pressure moments, Steve did not pause.

“Integrity, integrity, integrity.”

At senior levels, pressure is constant. Expectations are high. Personal accountability is real. Steve keeps it simple:

“I need to sleep with a clear conscience. I do what’s right. And sometimes doing what’s right is uncomfortable and challenging. But it’s much more challenging not to do what’s right.”

Where the profession is heading

Steve sees the industry at a genuine crossroads. Digital assets began life as the challenger and the disruptor. It is not yet fully mainstream, but it is clearly moving in that direction.

More traditional financial services firms are now entering the space, but not necessarily because they all want to trade crypto. It is the technology, the rails, the blockchain, the tokenisation of assets. That shift alone is going to reshape the landscape.

Over the next 12 months, Steve expects to see more consolidation, more acquisitions, and new players enter the space from established financial institutions.

“I couldn’t even predict what this space will look like in a year’s time because so much is changing.”

Running alongside that is a regulatory shift. Frameworks such as MiCA in the EU, developments from the FCA in the UK regarding FISMA, and evolving expectations in the US are moving the conversation away from “crypto regulation” towards alignment with traditional financial services regulation.

For digital asset firms, that means whole new areas of focus: trade surveillance, personal account dealing, pre-trade clearance, e-communications monitoring, etc. Regulators are no longer looking only at base-level AML controls.

The challenge, Steve says, is that many start-ups built their Compliance teams for where the industry was, not where it is going.

“There will be a number of firms that find themselves in a position where the teams that they've hired and built are falling short on the skills and expertise they're going to need to move forward to the next phase of where this industry and sector is moving.”

One piece of advice for early-career professionals

Steve did not hesitate:

“Don’t be in a rush. Take your time.”

Spend time across disciplines: KYC, transaction monitoring, financial intelligence, fraud, anti-bribery and corruption. Build breadth and depth.

“Get as many strings to your bow as you can. If you progress too quickly without that, you’ll hit a glass ceiling.”

The more you experience early, the more you can give later.

What sits behind the controls

Steve’s career is a reminder that senior Compliance leadership is not just about rules. It is about:

• Building teams stronger than yourself
• Breaking silos
• Influencing without imposing
• Creating an environment of trust
• Investing time in people

The technical skills get you in the door, but the softer skills determine how far you go.

Over to you

If you’re leading a function today, where does most of your time really go? And how deliberately are you investing in the people who will become your future leaders?

Drop your thoughts in the comments. I’d be interested to hear what resonates, and where your experience differs.

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