Know your client

The Devil’s Advocate™ Go Premium In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Yes, yes yes there’s the worldwide military-industrial complex dedicated to rooting out money laundering — let’s not get drawn into the debate as to whether legalising drugs might be a better policy response than systematically pariah-ising large sections of the emerging world economy and depriving them of access to the developed world’s capital markets — this is about actually knowing your clients. Having a good relationship with them, speaking to them, understanding their business, their expectations and their challenges, as a practical means of managing the risks, and opportunities, they present to your business.

This spills over to a number of Devil’s advocate themes: communication and persuasion; plain English; data; tech.

To this end:

• Don’t take a piece of paper to a knife fight
• Build trust:

• Communicate informally and often.
• Be personal, not adversarial. If you go to the legal docs, you’ve lost.
• Be authentic in your communication:

Authentic	Inauthentic
Personal relationships	Legal contracts
Individual email	“Client outreach”
Operations interaction	CEO dialogue
Pitches	Disclaimers
Phone calls	Advertising