About the examination process

Financial crime examinations

Financial crime examinations are conducted to assess compliance with statutory and regulatory obligations relating to anti-money laundering, countering the financing of terrorism, and countering proliferation financing (AML/CFT/CPF). Whilst the specific scope of each examination will differ, depending on the known or perceived areas of greatest risk within a supervised person, generally financial crime examinations will focus on:

1. whether the supervised person has implemented effective systems and controls to prevent, detect and report financial crime
2. whether the supervised person’s systems and controls enable it to comply with its statutory obligations set out in the Money Laundering (Jersey) Order 2008 and the AML/CFT/CPF Codes of Practice detailed in the Handbook
3. whether the supervised person’s systems and controls to prevent, detect and report financial crime are being complied with
4. the extent to which the risks of money laundering, the financing of terrorism, the financing of proliferation, and other financial crimes are understood by the supervised person’s principal persons, key persons and other employees

Stage	Timeline
Examination notification	10 weeks prior to the onsite stage of the examination
Information request and questionnaire issued	Eight weeks prior to onsite stage of the examination. See above for a breakdown of our information requests
Preliminary meeting	Within two weeks of IR1 being sent out
Submission by supervised person of customer list and other registers requested in IR1 part 1	Six weeks prior to onsite stage of examination
Submission by supervised person of questionnaire and requested information	IR1 parts two and three: four weeks prior to the onsite stage of the examination IR2: three weeks prior to the onsite stage of the examination
On-site activity	Up to five working days
Debrief meeting	Within six weeks post the onsite stage of the examination (if required)
Draft report issued	As soon as practicable
Factual accuracy response to draft report	20 working days following receipt of draft report
Final report issued	As soon as practicable following the expiry of the factual accuracy review period or following receipt and consideration of any factual accuracy response
Submission of remediation plan	20 working days following receipt of final report

Although we are increasing the amount of information requested up-front, it will help the examination team focus on specific areas which are identified as needing further attention, thereby reducing the impact on the supervised person during the onsite stage of the examination.

Depending on the scope of the examination, the onsites stage of the examination is expected to average between three and five working days.

A feedback paper on all financial crime examinations carried out during a calendar year will be published once all reports are finalised. The feedback paper will collate findings from the examinations, provide our comments on the findings overall, and set out examples of relevant good practice.

Supervisory risk examinations

Supervisory risk examinations are conducted in response to known or emerging risks within a particular entity. These examinations may include any number of risks relating to prudential, conduct or financial crime.

The focus of the examination will therefore depend on the specific issues and concerns identified relating to compliance with relevant statutory and regulatory requirements.

Stage	Current timeline
Examination notification and information request	Eight weeks prior to the onsite stage of the examination
Submission of requested information	Four weeks prior to onsite stage of the examination
On-site activity	Up to 10 working days (will vary according to scope of the examination)
Debrief meeting	Within 20 working days post the onsite stage of the examination (if required)
Draft report issued	As soon as practicable
Factual accuracy response to draft report	20 working days following receipt of draft report
Final report issued	As soon as practicable following the expiry of the factual accuracy review period or following receipt and consideration of any factual accuracy response
Submission of remediation plan	20 working days following receipt of final report

Thematic examinations

Thematic examinations are conducted in response to a perceived current or emerging regulatory risk. A particular topic is selected for review across a number of different entities, which are either from the same industry sector or across different sectors. This enables the standard of compliance on the topic to be assessed more broadly.

The examinations may be conducted through various means, including by way of a questionnaire/survey, in-depth examinations/desk-based activity or a combination of both.

Stage	Current timeline
Examination notification and information request	Eight weeks prior to the onsite stage of the examination
Submission of requested information	At least two weeks prior to the onsite stage of the examination
On-site activity	Three to five working days (depending on examination scope)
Debrief meeting	Within 20 working days post examination (if required)
Draft report issued	As soon as practicable
Factual accuracy response to draft report	20 working days following receipt of draft report.
Final report issued	As soon as practicable following the expiry of the factual accuracy review period or following receipt and consideration of any factual accuracy response
Submission of remediation plan	20 working days following receipt of final report.

A feedback paper will be published once all reports are finalised. The feedback paper will collate findings from the examinations, provide our comments on the findings overall, and set out examples of relevant good practice.

For all examinations

Before the examination

Notifying you about an upcoming examination

Our supervisors will contact you to let you know the type of examination we plan to undertake and to agree a suitable date for it to take place.

We will then follow up in writing with details of the examination and the team that will be conducting it.

Typically, the team carrying out your examination will comprise two or more examiners, depending on the type of examination and the size of your business. Your supervisor will provide support to the examination team.

Request for information

Before we undertake our examination, we will request information from your business so that we can carry out a desk-based review. We will email your designated primary contact to request this information, providing exact details of what we require and by when.

If you have any concerns about the information you need to collate and the deadline for providing it, you should raise this at your preliminary meeting with our examination team and we will work with you to agree a solution.

You can find details of the timelines for providing us with this requested information in the tables above.

Submitting your information

You will need to upload all the information we request from you to myJFSC, using your specific examination reference number and our standard naming conventions.

We will provide you with guidance about how to upload your information to the portal.

We may need to disclose the information you submit to us to third parties in order to fulfil our statutory functions effectively. This includes, but is not limited to, sharing personal data, described in our Privacy Notice. If you want to know more about how we may share data, please speak to your usual JFSC contact or our Data Protection Officer.

Requests for additional information and documents

In order to complete our examination, we may request further information from you at any time. For example, as part of our desk-based review we may formulate follow-up questions based on information and documentation provided in response to the information request.

These further requests may include asking for additional documents to be uploaded. We will try to request information as soon as possible so that you can upload any documents to myJFSC. We will give you exact details of the information we require and advise you of the naming convention to use when uploading.

Security of your documents

We have developed the portal with security measures to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of your data. These security measures have been reviewed and tested by external providers who have significant experience of dealing with the security of highly sensitive information.

Preliminary meeting

After you have received our request for information, we will hold a preliminary meeting with you to explain the examination in more detail and to answer any questions you may have about the process. With your primary contact, we will agree how and when this meeting will take place.

During this preliminary meeting, we will discuss how the on-site examination activity will take place.

Our examiners will also walk you through our information request to make sure you understand what information we need from you.

At this meeting, you will have the opportunity to raise any queries you may have about the examination.

Onsite examination activity

Duration

In the table above, we have indicated the timelines for completing the onsite stage of the examination activity. These timelines are a guide, as some examinations may need to be shorter or longer, depending on the type of examination and the size and complexity of your business.

We will let you know during your examination if we need more or less time.

Process

Before we start our examination activity, our examiners will provide you with a schedule of meetings that we will be conducting with your staff. These generally include your Key Person(s), and members of the Board/senior management. Interviews with other employees may also be scheduled depending on the scope of the examination. We will give you this schedule as soon as possible so you can make arrangements and let us know if we need to make any changes.

We may send out a second information request identifying a list of customer or testing files which we may need to review as part of the examination, depending on the type and scope of the examination. We will send you details of the information we require from these files and you will need to submit these to us through the myJFSC portal.

At the start of our onsite activity, we will have an opening meeting with you at your offices. This will give you an overview of our initial observations following our desk-based review of your documents, and any areas that we intend to explore further.

Each day, at a mutually agreed time, we will hold a brief end-of-day meeting with you to update you on our progress.

On the last day, we will aim to hold a soft close-out meeting with you to discuss our thoughts. This is to ensure there are ‘no surprises’ when you receive our draft report.

In line with our ‘no surprises’ approach, if matters arise which were not discussed at the soft close-out meeting, we will request a debrief meeting with you in line with the timelines described above. At this meeting, we will discuss the further points which have arisen since the end of the onsite activity.

We will have a note-taker from our examinations team present at all the meetings.

Interviewing your staff

Before we start our onsite activity, we will give you a list of employees who we will need to interview. We will most likely speak to your Key Person(s) and interview some or all of your Board/senior management team. Our examiners may also want to speak to other members of your staff, but we will let you know who we wish to interview in advance.

Any member of your staff who is being interviewed can request to have a senior colleague and/or note-taker present if they wish. We do ask that the senior colleague/note-taker allows the interviewee to answer our questions. We will also ask the senior colleague/note-taker to leave before the end of the interview.

JFSC meeting notes

We will not share or provide copies of the meeting notes taken by our examinations team. Any members of your staff who we interview can make their own notes during meetings, or request a note-taker to be present.

Our examination findings

Our team will discuss any potential findings they identify with your key staff (e.g. Key Persons and Board/senior management representatives) at the end-of-day meetings. This gives you the opportunity to consider any potential issues and provide any additional information, data or documents to the examination team to review before we issue our draft report.

Reporting

You can find details of our reporting timelines in the tables above.