Podcast | Financial Currents with ZISHI

The financial services sector is under pressure to adapt. Fast. Regulation is shifting, AI is accelerating and expectations on leaders, managers and teams are changing almost monthly.

Financial Currents with ZISHI cuts through that noise. Each episode brings together leaders, innovators and practitioners shaping the future of financial services – focused on what genuinely moves the industry forward.

What Employers Must Do to Prevent Sexual Harassment and Reduce Regulatory Exposure

In Episode 4 of Financial Currents with ZISHI, Graham McConkey, Head of Regulatory and Compliance Services at ZISHI, is joined by employment law specialist Jo Howard to explain the 2024 preventative duty and what it means in practice for financial services firms.

The conversation focuses on how organisations are expected to move from reacting to incidents to actively preventing them and what “reasonable steps” look like in real environments.

Where teams work closely and decisions are made quickly, boundaries are not always clearly defined or consistently understood. What may be perceived as informal behaviour in one context may be experienced very differently by others.

The impact shows up across the organisation.

Harassment affects trust, performance and retention and creates legal and regulatory exposure that firms are now expected to manage more actively.

Since October 2024, organisations have a clear duty to take proactive steps to prevent sexual harassment. This includes assessing risk, engaging staff, implementing effective reporting mechanisms and demonstrating that issues are addressed consistently.

In this episode

• How workplace boundaries become blurred in practice
• Why issues are often underreported across organisations
• The impact on trust, performance and retention
• The legal and regulatory exposure firms must manage
• The shift from reactive response to proactive prevention

Chapters

02:33 Enterprise Exposure & Impact
04:16 Statutory Definition & Liability
05:42 The 2024 Preventative Duty
06:25 Governance Controls & Monitoring
07:42 Culture & Reporting Risk
09:39 Enforcement & Accountability

For firms reviewing how these expectations are translated into practice, this includes how risk is assessed, how people are trained and how reporting is trusted.

These themes are also explored in the November 2025 edition of Advice Matters, which looks at non-financial misconduct and preventative duty expectations in more detail.

ZISHI supports financial institutions in meeting preventative duty requirements in practice, covering risk assessment, governance, reporting frameworks and training across related areas, including FCA-Compliant Anti-Sexual Harassment Training for Financial Services | Preventing & Responding to Workplace Harassment.