Strategic Priority 3: Strengthen our organisational resilience

To strengthen organisational resilience means making sure that we are well-placed to face unknown challenges, without compromising our day-to-day effectiveness. It also means making sure that everyone who engages with us can do so in the most straightforward and productive way. This requires us to have adequate human and financial resources, as well as effective operational risk controls and contingency plans to deal with the unexpected.

Our aim is to strengthen our organisational resilience so that we react, in a risk-focused way, without a missed step in our core activities of authorising, registering, supervising and intervening as and when required.

The keys to organisational resilience are:

• being able to grow our own skilled staff › making sure we have up-to-date I.T. systems
• ensuring our own strong financial position
• implementing a robust supervisory strategy that recognises emerging risks to prevent Jersey from being caught off-guard by financial market developments.

As we begin our strategic journey, key deliverables will focus on:

• continually improving our I.T. systems and cyber risk controls
• developing a new operational risk assessment framework
• strengthening significantly our centralised internal control functions
• reviewing our financial position working with Industry to review and, where appropriate, redesign our fees
• reviewing our legal risk.

Having adaptable, strongly motivated and highly skilled staff will help us to manage the unexpected. Encouraging diversity in our staff, high individual performance and personal commitment to career development are critical to this outcome. We will develop our internal staff training programme in areas such as financial crime, risk management and technology developments. We will encourage staff to work across our various organisational functions. We will put in place improved employment options to support flexible working and attract additional highly skilled employees.

We will develop our people strategy over the four years to value and reward collaborative, ambitious team-focused behaviours and those committed to developing world-class technical expertise. When we face unexpected challenges, it is these highly skilled staff, with a strong understanding of our public service role, who will make the difference. We will continue our work to promote and achieve diversity and inclusion across our workforce over the next four years and beyond.

One of the major benefits of improved organisational resilience is that we will have a level of assurance that we have the skills, resources and culture to deal with the evolution of the financial sector, understanding the risks and facilitating opportunities. We will engage closely with Government, Industry, Digital Jersey and Jersey Finance to keep our approaches to financial sector innovation under constant review as a key test of how well we are doing in managing new risks.

In response to the Government of Jersey’s commitment to tackling the Island’s climate emergency, we will also measure our environmental impact.

By 2023, our work to strengthen our organisational resilience will ensure that engagement with us is risk-focused, demonstrably effective and dynamic, in the face of presently unknown challenges.

Enhancing our digital interactions

• We will continuously improve our recently relaunched website as our key communication tool, in line with user feedback
• We will build new portals for both regulation and registry functions, leading to better interaction with us, particularly for those businesses that are developing their parallel capacities
• We will build new workflow management systems and processes for both our regulatory and registry work which will improve our efficiency, our data management and our agility
• We will facilitate better regulatory reporting for businesses that invest in data management and reporting in line with international standards.

Modernising our Registry

• We will implement digital registers which comply with international requirements
• We will improve customer access and experience to the Registry and our services.

Being even more accessible

• We will improve access to Industry statistics and further develop how we account holistically for what we do
• We will be easier to engage with from authorisation to market exit
• We will continue to develop our approach to facilitating innovative businesses.

Ensuring our finances are stable and sustainable

• We will review our cost controls and our medium-term financial outlook
• We will work with all our stakeholders to review our fee structures and, where appropriate, develop revised structures to support Jersey’s continued development as an international finance centre.

Managing operational risk

• We will build a consolidated approach to operational risk assessment
• We will strengthen our centralised management of internal controls.

Developing and supporting our staff

• We will rebalance our resourcing approach away from external service providers towards full-time staff and direct contractors in order to expand internal opportunities and reduce costs
• We will launch recruitment campaigns focused on part-time, temporary and back-to-work staff
• We will adapt our internal educational services to align with our strategic roadmap, focusing on financial crime and risk
• We will build new internal career development options with appropriate rewards for our staff.