From 1986, I was asked to produce such things as risk assessments and would just refuse. It was like Health and Safety for derivatives. The whole point of the City is to take and manage risk and I had no intention of filling out a form to tell the compliance department – by then the fastest growing part of the business – how big the risk was. Compliance departments changed the whole culture of the City. Apart from monitoring everything, we had to start minding our Ps and Qs. They basically took the fun out of trading - and they also missed the point. While compliance departments were getting us all to tick boxes, they failed to register that a derivatives industry was growing exponentially under their noses, an industry dealing in products they did not understand and with a risk profile they were oblivious to.