The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) has hammered down its own corporate values.
Rosie Allan, FINRA’s Senior Director for Organization Development, was the latest guest on FINRA’s podcast Unscripted.
In her role, Allan noted that she is charged with developing a framework for FINRA’s values which she described with four pillars: collaboration, expertise, innovation, and responsibility.
Allan said many people look at corporate culture, but she believes that corporate values is a better way for organization development.
“Culture is just defined with the way people act,” Allan, “What helps people how to act, how to behave, and how to make decisions is values.”
She said that everyone knows what FINRA’s mission is: investor protection and market protection.
Corporate values are a guide accomplishing that mission.
“What the culture does, what the values do is tell you how to do that,” she said.
Allan said FINRA’s values aren’t just important to FINRA employees.
“Anybody who works with FINRA will want to know what they can expect on the phone, on the other end of the conversation in the room,” she noted.
Allan said with regards to responsibility, the value had an inward and outward meaning.
“Inward it means, I’m responsible,” she said, “The outward part of the responsibility is what we do at FINRA. We are responsible for managing resources to work with the broker/dealers.”
Regarding innovation, she said, “Being open to new ideas.”
She said that while innovation is not something that is normally associated with a regulator like FINRA, it has innovated with technology, including moving much of its data into a cloud format.
On collaboration, she said, “Every day we do it…The step forward on that one and how it affects everybody is moving out of the old thinking of hierarchy around collaboration, and that is part of our old way of going to business. Now, we need to cross these lines of businesses; we need to step out of our silos, and most importantly, we need to be able to matrix.”
On expertise, she said, “we have everything from technical expertise to policy expertise….Expertise is almost like that responsibility that is two-fold.”
She said the two parts of expertise is being the expert and even stepping into being the expert and embracing that role.
The second part of expertise is recognizing when an individual does not have expertise in a certain area and bringing in someone with the appropriate expertise.
FINRA is a self-regulatory organization. It was created when the regulatory arms of the NYSE and the NASD merged in 2007.
