Regulatory change in 2000 and its impact on Latin America.

Note: The following article is an excerpt from the Compliance, Leadership and Innovation Podcast by Compliance without Borders.

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What major changes and trends have you seen happen in terms of regulatory compliance, compliance or integrity, as they say in Argentina, and also in terms of transparency, over the course of your years of experience in e-commerce?

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We started as entrepreneurs, with the idea of selling the company from day zero. So we always tried to do everything in such a way that the company that wanted to buy us had no doubts about the transparency and integrity of the leaders or the organisation itself. We were audited on a rotating basis by the big four, and when in doubt, we were audited. A phrase we had internally was the following: "now we have our target, it is to sell to a status American corporation". When we had a doubt, the answer was always: what would an American corporation do in this situation?

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And that led us to build a team, a set of processes, a super-digestible customer-oriented business for a North American corporation. At the beginning, we worked from the heart, we wanted to make it transparent and with integrity. Difficult, isn't it? In Argentina it is a lot. Now I am convinced that everything that has to do with compliance and integrity is like the eternal struggle between good and evil, and also between the short and the long term. How hard it is not to win that client we could have bribed to win, or to have to pay that fine because we made a mistake, when we could have bribed people not to pay it. There are thousands of things we could have done for our short term wellbeing, but which would have hurt our long term wellbeing.

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We really were as upright as we thought we were. And along the way something interesting happened, the Enron and Arthur Andersen case and all of that came to light. And all of a sudden all the American corporations became much more demanding of the integrity of their partners, customers and suppliers. Anyway, they became much more efficient. So, at that time we also had to learn a lot about Sarbanes Oxley, Sox and FCPA; because in a way there was a very strong shock in history, from my point of view as an entrepreneur. We had been saying: "we have to have integrity" and suddenly we had to have much more integrity than we were. In 2004 we went to that level.

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It was atrocious, because we had to do it practically in secret, to take care of the people in the company, because if there was a problem, we couldn't play with people's emotions: "they sell us, they buy us, they don't buy us, what's going to happen? So it was really a challenge in Argentina and Brazil. 

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I had to decide whether or not to stay with the company and I chose to stay. I did this corporate career and I started receiving e-mails saying: you have ten minutes to do this 30-minute training on FCPA or Compliance, or whatever. I put myself in my team's shoes and said: "damn, they're going to hate all this because they weren't courses done on a platform, and it wasn't the platform that was the problem, the problem was that they weren't designed for the human race on the other side, they were very oriented to comply with the Yankee law". 

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I don't know how it would be in Spain, but in Argentina it was absurd. We had to deal with that, we had to translate the rules, give them context, explain a message that for me is very important: "if you are part of a corporation that has a lot of capital, you have a lot of possibilities to do things". And part of the price of having those possibilities is to comply with those rules, not only with the FCPA. Everybody thinks of themselves as ethical in one way, but it's also reinforced by the FCPA course or the compliance course, or going to that lecture, or understanding the policies. And it's part of the price of all the possibilities that the corporation gives you. So we said we were going to do it, but at some points it was a tremendous shock!