William Tyree: Welcome to the Brand Intelligence Podcast. I’m your cohost, William Tyree, and today we’re bringing you a conversation we had before a live audience with compliance expert Matt Kelly. There’s been a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt among compliance professionals in response to changes at federal agencies.

This conversation is essential and timely for anyone who wants to know how marketing, compliance, budgets, and even careers are being impacted. Enjoy.

William Tyree: Alright hi everyone. Thanks for joining us for Compliance and Chaos today. I am William Tyree, CMO of Intelligence Bank, the content operations platform for marketing compliance team. Joining me is Matt Kelly, editor and CEO of a radical compliance, a blog and newsletter that provides commentary.

On corporate compliance, audit, governance, and risk management. Matt. Matt also previously ran compliance week in the 2000 tens and has been following the corporate compliance world for more than 20 years. Matt, welcome.

Matt Kelly: Thank you, William. It’s great to be here to talk with you and thank you for having me on.

William Tyree: Oh, this is gonna be really fun and, and super timely, so I’m looking forward to it as well. Thanks to everybody who is joining us live right now. We will reserve some time at the end and perhaps during, to take live questions. So please just feel free to fire live questions in at any point and we’ll get to them.

Okay, so Matt the topic that brings us here today is a little bit of chaos in our universe right now. So we’re barely a hundred days into the new administration, but there’s already a lot of confusion out there, terms of what is actually happening, what will happen, what might happen, especially in regards to federal agencies.

You know, one of the. One of the things that I’ve been following quite a bit is one key agency and just as one example, right, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The general cadence around this over the last like a hundred days has been as follows, like early February, the White House orders work stoppage there.

Then the White House says it won’t shut it down. Then employee testimony claims an effort underway to fire all 1700 employees. And then all throughout, you know, February, March, April, headlines about courts blocking efforts to fire employees, it dismantled the agency. And it seems like that litigation is kind of ongoing and that’s by no means an isolated incident.

So we’ve seen a mult, a similar story. Across multiple agencies, and I think that news cycle is really starting to cause some fear and doubt. I, I noticed on the radical compliance website you talk a little bit about Gartner’s new list of emerging risks for senior risk executives. Can you tell us a little bit about one, you know, what their findings were, but also what are your observations about, you know, what this news cycle is kind of doing to folks?

Matt Kelly: Well, yeah, sure. And so broadly speaking, the Gartner report, which came out at the beginning of April it essentially said that the chaotic regulatory environment right now is driving compliance officers crazy. And I talk with a lot of compliance officers. That is indeed true. Specifically the phrase that Gartner used was that the unsettled, regulatory and legal environment that is now ranked as the top.

Concern for risk and compliance professionals in first quarter, 2025, up from the number three slot in the prior two quarters. Now, think about that because in the prior two quarters that was. Latter 2024. We were not certain who would actually be leading Washington in 2025. So you can see why people would be a bit uncertain about that.

Well, now we do know who is leading and uncertainty has gone up. So that’s really quite a jarring statement. I, I love that you used the example of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because it does get at the heart of what does the law say. What is, what are we actually doing to enforce the law?

If there is a radical change in how the agency operates, could that be challenged? If it’s challenged, is that challenge gonna stick? And we, we could go on for hours just on that case, but if you are a compliance officer at some sort of. Financial firm, FinTech startup any firm that really somehow offers cons financial services to consumers.

And there’s a lot of companies that would say, well, I’m not really a finance firm, so I’m not immune, or I’m not subject to that. Yes, you could be. It’s a great example of how you can get pulled into this mess that. The law says you have an issue, but you don’t know how you’re supposed to respond to it because you don’t know what your enforcement risks are.

And it just shows this great irony here that the Trump administration, which was, is claims to be the great deregulator. It is actually right now making corporate compliance more difficult because we have. Policies that might shift such as even just tariffs. Great example. Are they on, are they not on, are they on over here?

But not over there. You might have policies that contradict each other and you might have policies where the federal government is retreating, but states or other. Regulatory bodies out there, they’re gonna rush in to fill that vacuum. So if you’re a company that has to be ready to pivot to address an enforcement issue or a compliance rule that might come from any different direction, it’s getting very difficult to understand which end is up.

Listen to the full episode to see even more great conversation between William Tyree and Matt Kelly…