Compliance risk is defined as the risk of legal sanctions, incurring financial losses or losing reputation or reliability due to failure of the Group, its employees or entities acting on its behalf to comply with the provisions of the law, internal regulations and standards of conduct adopted by the Group, including ethical standards.
The objective of compliance risk management is to ensure the Group’s compliance with law and adopted standards of conduct and the Bank’s acting as an entity that is reliable, fair and honest, through mitigating compliance risk, reputation risk or the Group’s credibility and mitigating the risk of occurring financial losses or legal sanction risk resulting from breach of regulations and ethical standards.
Compliance risk management in the Group involves in particular the following:
- preventing involvement of the Group in illegal activities,
- ensuring data protection,
- promoting ethical standards and monitoring their functioning,
- conflict of interest management,
- preventing situations where the Group’s employees could be perceived as pursuing their own interest in the professional context,
- professional, fair and transparent formulation of product offers, advertising and marketing messages,
- prompt, fair and professional consideration of complaints, requests and claims of clients.
The rules concerning the process of compliance risk management adopted by all of the Group’s entities are inherent within the PKO Bank Polski SA Group.
Group entities have adopted a zero tolerance policy against compliance risk, which means that the Group entities focus their actions towards preventing cases of materialisation of that risk.