Compliance 2009: Who's pulling the strings?

From a compliance perspective, buy-side firms have to cope with something of a triple whammy: internally driven procedures of checks and balances for the fund's own staff; regulatory processes that must be negotiated and satisfied in order to appease regulatory bodies; and increasingly demanding investors, many of whom have different - and often pedantic - requirements. Of the three constituents, however, it's the investors who have the ability to literally transform buy-side firms' fortunes