Welcome back to the podcast, bribe, swindle, or steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogi, and today we're talking about some uniquely Asian compliance challenges

and what compliance professionals outside the region should know about them.

My guest is Barbara Tsai.

She is based in Shanghai, where she is the APAC

head of anti-bribery and corruption and also the deputy global head of anti-bribery and corruption

for UBS, the investment banking company headquartered in Zurich. Thank you for joining me, Barbara.

Hi, Alexandra. Thank you for having me. There are three areas that I hear about more than any other in your region, three compliance areas, and they relate to weddings, funerals, and the Lunar New Year, and they all involve questions of cash. So I am hopeful that over the next 20 minutes or so, you are going to help our listeners figure

out their way through these.

At least I hope to shed some light on what goes on over here in Asia.

Why don't we start with weddings?

I think all three of these issues raise questions of cash in envelopes.

But why don't we start with the, I guess, in Korea and Japan,

white envelopes and in China, the red envelopes. Can you tell us a little bit about how entrenched

this is and what is expected at weddings when there's a business relationship as opposed to a

social relationship? For weddings, I think in Asian culture,

at least with respect to North Asia, which is part of my coverage area, giving cash in

envelopes has always been a very strong cultural tradition. It's been something that I think over

the 13 years that I've been practicing compliance in China, that's continued to be an

issue. I think no discussion in a business context is complete without the social component,

just because it forms the fabric of what employees in an organization are coming from as a baseline.

So traditionally, I don't think that anyone within China or in Japan or Korea

...