Outlook for 2021

Our strategic roadmap articulated a multi-year project of challenging work on multiple fronts. Events have shown us that we were correct to emphasise resilience, risk-focused choices and financial crime, but there are lessons to be learnt. Our analysis of our environment tells us that uncertainty will remain high throughout 2021, including market risk, conduct risk, cyber risk, financial crime risk and the potential for further market fragmentation.

Working with Industry -‘smart regulation’

To meet our targets for 2020, we had to intensify our engagement with Industry. The scale of webinars, videos and bilateral support was unparalleled last year and the feedback to this online delivery was overwhelmingly positive. Accordingly, we plan to continue and embed this level of engagement during 2021, complementing written consultations with more dialogue and more open-ended discussion.

Checking we are on course

Our plans to execute our strategic roadmap remain broadly on course, but 2020 holds valuable lessons for us that we want to take on board. We will be undertaking a full strategic review of what we had planned to deliver between 2020 and 2023. Initially we envisaged conducting this review once we had completed the roadmap, but we cannot ignore the impact of the
pandemic and our first year of intensified capital investment. And Industry needs to be part of that strategic discussion.

Reprioritising and rescheduling our plans

It became apparent during 2020 that a number of our ambitious supervisory projects are considerably more challenging to deliver than initially scheduled, particularly under the pressured circumstances presented by Covid-19. We have also accommodated additional projects at the request of our stakeholders.

We are carrying some deliverables into 2021 and this requires some rescheduling for our subsequent projects. We are, however, learning by doing and what we want to deliver is also evolving.

Heading in the right direction

As we enter the second year of our strategic journey, our approach will
centre on:

• Reaping the benefits from the considerable investment we made in new core systems with detailed customisation of our supervisory workflow
• Adding additional features to our registry services which will improve flexibility, timeliness and our customers’ online experience
• Enhancing our external reporting and education, particularly in relation to financial crime, through feedback papers, webinars and engagement with trade bodies
• Finalising our rolling review of our fees mechanisms
• Planning and preparing for our next big push in project work, focused on risk and data, which will begin in 2022 in line with our strategic roadmap.

Developing regulatory policies for changing financial markets

We continue to watch financial markets closely and identify policy goals which respond to market developments. We are well-advanced in developing our approach to regulating Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) issues. With close engagement from Industry, we can develop a regulatory framework that allows Jersey to be a location of choice for responsible ESG issuance.

We will work with Government to develop regulatory regimes for retail lending and virtual asset services providers (VASPs), which respond to the continuing growth of both sectors.

As financial crime risks change, we will work closely with Industry to prepare recommendations for Government to adjust the exemptions available from financial crime requirements to ensure that only low risk exemptions are allowed. This protects Jersey’s reputation.

We will develop our regulatory framework within which financial advisers operate in Jersey, so that they can be as clear as practical on their duties of care to their customers.

We will implement important changes to the way we do authorisations to make the process more risk-focused, so that we provide better protection to customers of regulated businesses while also facilitating innovation.