Albert Goodman, which employs around 300 people in five offices across the South West of England, provides accountancy, tax, financial planning and business advisory services to a range of clients.

To focus the film’s content, Sophie split staff up into their individual departments and got each department to watch the film together in a group forum. People then broke out into smaller groups and were given a question to discuss.

These groups later came back into the main forum where everyone got to debate the thoughts and points people had raised within their discussion groups. “Because we were focusing on specific service lines, we asked: ‘How would that apply in our particular area?’” says Sophie. 

Each of the break-out groups used the questions and model answers provided in ICAEW’s learning materials as a starting point. “But then I was in the room to make it relevant to the work they do on a day-to-day basis,” Sophie explains.

Embedding culture

The depiction of AML culture within the film’s fictional firms offered a useful way of opening up discussions about Albert Goodman’s own culture. There were a lot of questions being asked by the partners – the senior people in the fictional firms – around whether source of funds checks had been made, explains Sophie. 

“So we really focused on that,” she says, “in terms of what is the flow of the questions around AML in our firm and how can we ensure that all of our people feel empowered to raise these questions and challenge responses” To this end, she asked the groups questions such as: What would you do if you were told by a Partner that all of the AML checks had been done but you could not see them on the file? How would you push back to this and to whom would you go if you were not satisfied?

A key aim was to drive home the message that doing the right checks should continually be in people’s thought processes and ingrained in whatever they are doing. Although these checks have long been known as the AML checks, Sophie wants to move this on and “rebrand” to more of a “know your client process”. 

“All we're actually doing,” she stresses, “is making sure that we do know the client – that’s all these questions are really looking for us to do. And, if we know our client, not only is it good from a risk perspective, but it's also good from a service perspective in that the more you know about your client, the more you can support them, and the more added value you can give. That was what I was really trying to bring out.”

Sharing across service lines

The film-based workshops have already had an impact. “Generally we work on a model whereby a partner will own a relationship with a client, but the client will have multiple touch points and multiple service services that they use throughout the firm,” Sophie explains. 

“What the film has done is made people so much more aware that while, for example, they might operate the payroll, they still need to make the engagement partner aware of any concerns or problems or queries in relation to a client, because it impacts the overall picture.”

“If any service line has concerns, everybody working for that client needs to be made aware of those concerns,” she explains, “so that the information can impact our risk assessment, the questions we ask and how sceptical we are when we're engaging with that client.”

She believes the film’s scenarios and content already have a very wide reach, but she also points out that it's down to each individual practice to make it relevant to their circumstances. “The impact in any firm is going to be dependent upon the person who's delivering the training,” she says, “and making sure you embed it into your current processes and systems.”