Our strategic roadmap and the journey so far

In our strategic roadmap for 2020-2023, we identified three priorities, which we would need to focus on to position Jersey and the JFSC as a well-regulated jurisdiction prepared for an increasingly uncertain environment.

Everything we have experienced in the last year tells us that these three priorities remain critical for 2021:

• Build even more effective supervision
• Embed risk-focused choices throughout our work
• Strengthen our organisational resilience.

As we reflect on what was a turbulent and challenging year for all in 2020, we can celebrate significant successes in what we delivered and reflect on the strong position we are now in for 2021 to build on those foundations.

Our focuses in 2020 were:

• Putting the fight against financial crime at the heart of our supervisory approach Rolling out data-based risk assessments as a driver for day-to-day supervisory decisions
• Building new digital platforms for both the Registry and regulatory sides of our organisation
• Adjusting the JFSC’s own financing mechanisms (including fees) to make us more financially resilient in the face of future shocks
• Developing and supporting our staff and laying the foundations for new workflow management systems.

While predominantly working remotely for three quarters of the year, in 2020 we achieved the following and more:

We demonstrated our resilience and adaptability in the face of a pandemic by:

• Remaining open for business by transitioning to home working and moving all our regulatory activities online
• Supporting the Island's businesses by keeping the Registry open
• Providing significant support to the Government of Jersey with the Business Disruption Scheme, Essential Employee Register for Financial Services Businesses and regular reporting on the challenges and economic impacts of Covid-19
• Undertaking significant outreach to Industry to ensure business continuity planning and organisational resilience
• Adopting a flexible approach to Industry deadlines, publishing enhanced guidance to respond to the challenges faced by Industry, working closely with Jersey Finance, and delivering a series of webinars to allow questions to be raised and answered.

We increased our focus on fighting financial crime by:

• Continuing our work to in developing our capacity to supervise the fight against financial crime across Jersey's finance industry
• Carrying out an ambitious programme of financial crime compliance focused examinations on 86 businesses, 83 of which were undertaken remotely
• Finalising our contribution to Jersey’s first National Risk Assessment for money laundering, which the Government of Jersey published in late September
• Publishing our report on the development of a shared ‘know your customer’(KYC) utility
• Reviewing our authorisations framework with a view to making enhancements in 2021 to the way we grant licences to businesses.

We took significant steps to becoming a fully digital regulator and Registry by:

• Completing the first phase of our extensive programme to deliver a fully digital Registry which simplified interactions for all our customers and allows for enhanced intelligence, vetting and compliance
• Upgrading the whole core workflow management platform used by our Supervision team to prepare for recalibration of our supervisory workflows in 2021
• Rolling out the next phase of our risk model so all our supervisors are now able to capture and monitor risk more effectively
• Deploying the first phase of the work to upgrade our online regulatory service so regulated persons can more easily submit and update their personal information.

We started future proofing our fees mechanisms by:

• Reviewing our financial resilience and initiating discussions with Industry on revised fee structures to underpin our financial resilience
• Introducing new fees for businesses applying for eligible foreign limited partnerships to continue as a limited partnership in Jersey.