Certified Ethics & Compliance Officer CECO 2025

Description

Expectations of society are rising and reputations of companies and people can be shattered in no-time. In order to prevent  scandals, more and more legislation is launched, fines are getting higher and supervisors are getting stricter. Banks and external accountants are asking questions about your compliance program.

Ethics and Compliance Officers help you to protect your reputation. But how to set up an effective ethics & compliance program?

Are you up to date with current best practices in Ethics & Compliance?

Are you looking for recognition as an Ethics & Compliance Professional? Or do you simply want to increase your knowledge and expertise in this field? Take this course and become a Certified Ethics & Compliance Officer (CECO®)!

You will be taught by the top minds in the compliance industry.

Lessons are provided in small groups, so you get the right attention you need for the best learning efficiency.

Request a Factsheet?

Fill in the form at the bottom of this page and you will receive the factsheet in your mailbox.

Program

The training program is based on the ten elements of an effective ethics & compliance programme, such as performing a risk assessment, policy writing, creating awareness and monitoring and reporting.  In addition, you will gain the necessary knowledge in the field of combating bribery, corruption, money laundering, terrorist financing and the prevention of conflicts of interest, forced labor and other supply chain risks.

Furthermore, the legislation in the field of trade restrictions, competition and data privacy (the GDPR) is discussed. Naturally, due attention is also paid to the latest developments in the field of ethics & compliance.

The course will be launched from The Netherlands, targeting a Dutch/European audience. This can be extended to a Middle East/African audience. We will use the English language.

The curriculum of the ethics & compliance course

First morning session

Teacher | Drs. G. (Geert) Vermeulen

  • Introduction to the course
  • Short history of the compliance function
  • Models for Ethics & Compliance programs
  • The Fraud Triangle
  • ECMC 10 Elements of an effective Ethics and Compliance Program

Second morning session

Teacher | Dr. J. (Jelle) van Baardewijk

  • Introduction into business ethics

Afternoon session

Teacher | Drs. G. (Geert) Vermeulen

  • The Governance of Compliance Programs; 3 Lines Model
  • Risk Management; Compliance Risk Assessment
  • How to conduct a Compliance Risk Assessment
  • Exercise
  • Compliance Action Plan
  • Monitoring and reporting

First morning session

Teacher | Mr. M. (Musa) Elmas

  • Anti-Money Laundering (for non-financials)

Second morning session

Teacher | Mr. Y. (Yvo) Amar

  • Sanctions
  • Export controls

Afternoon session

Teacher | Drs. G. (Geert) Vermeulen

  • Anti-Bribery and Corruption
  • Third Party Due Diligence
  • Supply Chain Due Diligence and modern slavery risks

Morning session

Teacher | Mr. J. (Joep) Bakker

  • Data Privacy
  • Introduction to the EU AI Act

First afternoon session

Teacher | Drs. G. (Geert) Vermeulen

  • Conflicts of Interest
  • Insider trading

Second afternoon session

Teacher | Marit Boon-Striekwold

  • Culture, Conduct & Behaviour
  • Soft controls
  • VCO toolbox
  • Exercise Dilemma Workshop

Morning session

Teacher | Mr. C. (Claudia) Koken

  • Competition law
  • Dawn Raids / Response plan

Afternoon Session

Teacher | Drs. G. (Geert) Vermeulen

  • Values workshop
  • EU Whistleblower Protection Directive
  • Whistleblowing procedures / speaking up
  • Coordinating Investigations
  • Incentives and disciplinary actions

Morning session

Teacher | Mrs. N. (Nicole) Rose

  • A Masterclass on producing effective training and communications
  • Audience and stakeholders
  • Being audience centric
  • Storytelling compliance
  • Board reporting
  • Drafting effective policies

Afternoon session

Teacher | Drs. G. (Geert) Vermeulen

  • Human rights risks and ESG
  • CSRD: non-financial reporting requirements for large companies
  • CSDDD
  • Miscellaneous
  • Exercise in setting up a compliance program

Goals / Results

After completion of the Certified Ethics & Compliance Officer (CECO®) course, you will be able to set up an effective ethics & compliance program. The course has been designed from a European perspective, but the participants will also learn about good practices from the US and the UK and about the extraterritorial reach of US and UK legislation.

Exam

The CECO® course is an internationally certified training for Ethics & Compliance officers. A theoretical exam will be conducted by an independent examination agency.

After you have passed the exam, you will be included in the Compliance register, part of the Financial Intelligence Register, for two years and you can place the title CECO® after the family name.

A system of permanent education (PE) has been set up for this course, so that the professional competence of the Certified Ethics & Compliance Officer can be permanently and demonstrably guaranteed.

Whom?

  • Ethics & Compliance Officers who are relatively new to the role or want to make the next step in their career
  • In-house counsel who are requested to cover compliance as well
  • Ethics & Compliance Officers with several years of experience
  • Corporate lawyers who also have compliance responsibilities
  • Corporate secretaries
  • Non-executive directors
  • Internal auditors who will audit compliance programs
  • External auditors & accountants who need to form an opinion on the quality of a compliance program
  • Service providers to the ethics and compliance community

Target Organizations

  • Large corporates with new/junior people in a compliance role
  • Utilities (water, electricity, transport, network companies), companies with > 500/1.000 employees
  • Compliance software vendors
  • Integrity officers in the public sector
  • Companies outside of the financial services industry that are subject to anti-money laundering legislation, like car dealers, ship builders, casinos, accountants, law firms, notaries, real estate brokers, jewelers, art dealers, etc.
  • Security management firms.

Costs

The costs of the training are € 4995,- excluding VAT, exam costs € 395,-.

Accommodation arrangements are available on request for your stay during the training.

The classroom and the hotel are in the vicinity of Schiphol/Utrecht.

If you wish, we will pick you up from the airport by arrival and take you to your hotel in the Utrecht area free of charge, just let us know.

Course duration

We organize the training as an open registration. This means that if there are sufficient registrations, you will receive a message well in advance when the training will start.

The training lasts a week, the day times are from 09.30 am to 17.30 pm.  There is plenty of time for a break between classes.

This is an interactive training and we will ask you participate in the (group) assignments during the course.

Course dates in 2025:

  • Monday 16 June till Friday 20 June 2025

Lecturers

The mission of Geert Vermeulen is to help organizations conduct business in an ethical and compliant way. Geert is specialized in establishing and improving ethics and compliance programs in general and anti-corruption and whistleblowing programs in specific. In 2016 he founded ECMC: Ethics & Compliance Management & Consulting. ECMC provides compliance training, consulting services and interim ethics & compliance management. Previously he has been the Chief Compliance Officer of two multinational companies. Geert has provided compliance training in some 30 countries, on virtually all continents.

Geert regularly speaks and writes on ethics and compliance. He has been the President of the Dutch Compliance Officers Association, where he founded the expert group on Financial Economic Crime. He is a member of the expert group on Culture and Behavior of the association and a member of the Professional Advisory Committee of the Law Compliance Minor at The Hague University. When he was granted the National Compliance Award in 2020, he was labelled ‘the compliance guru’; the jury called him a figurehead and role model for the compliance community.

In 2020 Geert launched his new company called ‘The Integrity Coordinator’. This company is an independent, external coordinator of whistleblowing or speak up procedures.

Geert is the principal lecturer and co-organizer of the CECO course. Geert will cover the topics governance, risk assessments, monitoring, speak-up/whistleblowing procedures, investigations, anti-bribery & corruption, third party due diligence and ESG.

Yvo is a lawyer specialised in economic sanctions and export controls and is based in Amsterdam. Yvo’s practice focuses on all aspects of international trade law as well as anti-money laundering, anti-terrorism financing ABAC laws and regulations.

Yvo regularly publishes in legal magazines and teaches courses on sanctions and export controls at several universities in the Netherlands. He is regularly consulted by the EU and the UN on sanctions effectiveness.

Yvo is a frequent speaker at international conferences and a prominent Dutch television specialist on sanctions. He is often interviewed by, and quoted in, national and international news outlets.

I am a seasoned international business lawyer with a background in EU law and competition law. In the last 25 years I had the opportunity to learn, experience and develop myself. A great journey sofar. From working for a competition authority, and attorney at (global) law firms, to founding boutique law firms and working in-house at corporates on secondments in strategic projects. I believe my diverse work and management experience and broad set of legal and personal skills has made me a better lawyer. Over the years I have expanded my horizon and practice.

My practice and projects focus on:
Dutch and EC competition law 🔸EU law🔸investigations🔸corporate compliance 🔸anti-bribery | ethics & integrity 🔸merger control & FDI🔸consumer law

👉
✔️Member of the Dutch Bar Association (NOvA) | The International Bar Association (IBA) | the American Bar Association (ABA, section Antitrust)
✔️Featured in Chambers Europe, Competition The Netherlands 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016
✔️Co-Founder/Board Member of W@CompetitionNL, part of Women AT

Joep is a IT privacy lawyer at The Data Lawyers. The Data Laywers is law firm which specialises in Privacy, AI and IT Law. Joep mainly advises clients in the field of privacy law. In this field, Joep advises national and international clients, varying from start-ups to multinationals in different sectors. He assists in the implementation of entire privacy compliance projects, provides ad hoc advice on privacy and AI related topics, regularly provides in-house training and awareness sessions and represents his clients in legal proceedings. Joep regularly works together with compliance officers in various projects and is therefore familiar with the day-to-day privacy tasks of compliance officers.

Joep provides (in-house) trainings for clients and (guest)lectures for educational institutions. He furthermore publishes articles in professional magazines and writes the occasional blogpost. Joep is also a member of the Netherlands Association for Young Privacy Lawyers (Jonge Privacy Advocaten Nederland; JPAN) and the Netherlands Association for Information technology and Law (Nederlandse Vereniging voor Informatietechnologie en Recht; NVvIR).

Joep will – amongst others – talk about privacy compliance and the GDPR, cookie requirements and employee monitoring in the CECO training.

Musa Elmas CCP works as an (interim) senior compliance officer/CDD expert, advisor and trainer and has worked at the Dutch Compliance Institute for more than 10 years. Since December 2019, he has been working as an independent entrepreneur under the company name Elmas Compliance & Due Diligence.

Over the years, Musa has developed into an all-round compliance professional, specializing in CDD (Customer Due Diligence). He has provided advisory services to dozens of different financial companies and has trained thousands of compliance and CDD professionals as a trainer. At the Dutch Compliance Institute, Musa was, among other things, responsible for the provision of services in the field of CDD. Musa was at the basis of the development, content and design of the National Anti-Money Laundering Congress and the Combating Money Laundering & Terrorist Financing Course and many related leading national training courses.

He was also editor-in-chief of several editions of the Practical Guide to Combating Money Laundering & Terrorist Financing. In his daily compliance practice, he has carried out consultancy, secondment and interim work for many different financial companies, including setting up/running compliance departments and setting up/revising and implementing CDD control frameworks.

Musa regularly speaks, trains and publishes on Compliance and CDD. Upon request, he also regularly sheds light on CDD in the national media.

In the CECO compliance training, Musa will discuss the topic of Customer Due Diligence, in particular combating money laundering.

Marit Boon-Striekwold, Bachelor in Communications, LVV recognized Confidential Advisor and Compliance Professional specialized in behavioural and cultural risks.

Marit Boon started at ING after studying Communication Management in Utrecht. During her career of 22 years at this bank, she has held various roles, the last 10 years within Compliance with a focus on behaviour and culture. Among other things, she was responsible for topics such as the code of conduct, whistleblower regulations, implementation of the bankers oath with disciplinary law and monitoring risk culture. She later rolled out a risk culture monitoring methodology and moral judgment approach within Global Compliance worldwide.

With this she gained experience with risk culture research in various countries and advised local management on improvement in this area. Thereafter, as Global Lead, Marit established and managed the Culture & Ethics team. In 2022, Marit made the choice to advise organizations on compliance culture as an independent consultant. She is also active as a trainer and lecturer on this topic.

In addition to the above, Marit is a certified external Confidential Advisor, active within the Professional Association of Compliance Officers (VCO) as Chair of the Knowledge Table on Behaviour & Culture, and is engaged as a voluntary confidential advisor for the Food Bank Netherlands.

My mission is to empower professionals to use their existing creative assets to rejuvenate ineffective training and produce effective transfer of their knowledge to others in a way that is engaging and meaningful.

What I do:

✐ I support in-house compliance and legal teams to produce and deliver engaging courses and workshops
✐ to encourage people to speak up, reduce breaches and demonstrate a positive culture of ethics, integrity and compliance
✐ I teach people to use my methodology to produce engaging training: https://www.nicolerose.co/the-frame-training-method

I do this by using creativity, psychology and 25 years experience in compliance.

✅ Over the past 25 years I have worked as a lawyer and compliance professional as in-house legal, Head of Risk and Compliance and special consultant roles for global insurance, energy, technology, retail, financial institutions and not for profits.

✅ I work with leading global organisations helping them to build and maintain a culture of compliance, with a particular emphasis on fighting financial crime and encouraging employees to speak up. These include Aon, Airbus, Deliveroo, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Oxfam, Rio Tinto, Rabobank, Rolls Royce, Trace International, Wesfarmers, and Uniting Church in Australia.

✅ Using my creativity and experience training running legal and compliance initiatives, I design and implement risk, compliance, ESG, governance and legal frameworks and lead transformational change projects to create a culture of compliance.

✅ Creator of The Frame Training Method ™ and co-host of the Eight Mindsets Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/41UFtAZP2dpLEJtm68NtHO

Jelle van Baardewijk is a lecturer and university lecturer in business and policy ethics. He is co-author with Ad Verbrugge and Govert Buijs of The Good Life and the Free Market, for which he received the Socrates Challenge Cup 2018.
He writes for magazines such as Business Ethics: environment and society.

Here you can download Moral Grip, a more accessible booklet on ethics by him.

Jelle is a member of the Ethos Center of the Vrije Universiteit for public philosophy and is also known from the YouTube channel De Nieuwe Wereld.

A collection by him will be published in June 2024, entitled Time for business ethics (see here).
He previously published what is the university on earth? (2014) And Education in times of digitalization (2017).

Would you like to read more;

Jelle wrote many accessible pieces about business ethics. Three opinions for illustration:

2024: about ASML and social responsibility in EW/Elsevier

2020: about international chain responsibility in FD

2018: about (women) quote for important positions in Profiles

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