Dutch banks are struggling to recruit hundreds of money laundering experts to beef up their compliance departments, the Financieele Dagblad said on Friday.

So desperate have banks become that they are advertising for school leavers with no experience and offering starting salaries of €3,000 plus a ‘focus on personal growth’, the paper said.

But despite the best efforts of recruitment firms to make the jobs seem exciting, most of the junior level ‘customer due diligence’ work is dull and nothing to do with ‘catching crooks’, the paper points out.

Hence, job hopping is common and companies struggle to keep hold of the staff they have.

Key function

Banks are only just realising that checking for money laundering has become a key activity, CDD expert Jaan-Jan Deverschot told the paper, and they are now putting more effort into keeping staff on board.

Rabobank, for example, is setting up its own CDD training academy and the other banks are investing in training and coaching, he said. Banks are also looking abroad, to England, Spain and eastern Europe to bring in new recruits.

Despite technological advances, checking for money laundering still needs human input. ‘The big switch to automation will only happen when more IT systems are linked, Erik Schut of interim management consultancy Eiffel told the paper. ‘At the moment, there is no serious alternative to the battle to recruit new staff.’