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Ethical gaps in Financial Services: Insights from the 2025 E&C Program Effectiveness Report

The Financial Services sector faces unique ethics and compliance challenges, from growing regulatory expectations to increasing concerns about leadership accountability and third-party risks. Our research, based on a subset of responses received as part of our global study, explores how financial services firms compare to global peers in ethical decision-making, program effectiveness, and risk management. 

This sector-specific report provides a detailed look at the ethical gaps that financial institutions must address in 2025—and the strategies high-performing firms are using to close them. 

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How do Financial Services ethics and compliance programs measure up?

  • A growing ethics gap 
    Financial Services leaders (91%) are overwhelmingly reported to make values-based decisions—yet only 28% of middle managers do the same, marking a 63-point gap and 1.5x higher than the global average. 
  • Lower investment in ethical culture measurement 
    Only 40% of high-impact Financial Services firms regularly assess ethical culture, compared to 45% globally.  
  • Lagging supply chain risk oversight 
    High-impact Financial Services programs are 11% behind their global peers in prioritizing third-party compliance and supply chain oversight, despite increasing regulatory scrutiny across Europe and beyond. 
  • Benchmarking and analytics adoption remain low 
    Financial Services firms trail high-impact global programs by 9-15% in leveraging benchmarking, analytics, and real-time insights to strengthen compliance effectiveness and program impact. 
2025 Ethical Gaps in the Financial Services Sector Report cover