What Is Culture And What Does It Mean?

The Wolf of Wall Street film or the Netflix series on Bernie Madoff provide entertaining and graphic examples of where culture and conduct spiral out of control leaving devastated employees and victims in their wake. Here we discuss how to achieve a healthy AML/CTF/CPF culture and what the expectations of the Regulator are likely to be.

What is Culture and what does it mean?

The Cambridge Dictionary defines culture within the workplace as “The ideas and ways of working that are typical for an organization, and that affect how it does business and how its employees behave”.

There are many words that could be used to describe a firm – competitive, quality-focused, a community, ethical, one of entitlement, rewards risk-taking and they are all descriptive elements of a firm's organisational culture – “how things are done in this company”.