Business Plan 2023

Introduction

This 2023 business plan clearly states our priorities and ambition for the year ahead, helping industry and our wider stakeholder community to understand our focus.

Our Strategic Framework 2021-2024 outlines our vision to be a ‘high-performing regulator, building for the long-term success of Jersey’. As we embark on the second year of our strategic journey, the 2023 business plan outlines our core work streams and key initiatives. Aligned to our strategic anchors, we will continue to focus on preparations for the upcoming MONEYVAL assessment, digital transformation, and people strategy, as we seek to strengthen our capability as a high-performing organisation.

"The MONEYVAL assessment will be a critical test of the effectiveness of the Island’s approach to combatting financial crime."

We also clarify our forecast income and expenditure and reflect on what we achieved in 2022. Our organisation has emerged from the pandemic firmly focused on the delivery of our top strategic priority of ‘achieving sustainable long-term excellence in regulatory effectiveness and increased capability for the Island in combatting financial crime.’

Chair's statement

Our perimeter has been expanded as a consequence of new regimes including Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) and Money or Value Transfer Services (MVTSs), and amended regimes such as Non-Profit Organisations (NPOs), etc. In addition, we have to respond to the increased complexity of the businesses we regulate as they digitise and innovate.

There is no doubt that 2022 was a year of profound change in the world. 2023 looks no different. As we emerged from a pandemic that has dominated most of our interactions for the last two years, we find ourselves in a vastly different world to that of pre-Covid. Changes driven by energy and food supply chain issues, the war in Ukraine, and de-globalisation are affecting the world we live in. These changes and the uncertainty they bring, are affecting all aspects of our personal and business life and feeding through to a more volatile economic future.

Whilst, instinctively, economic uncertainty and volatility leads to businesses and households adopting a more defensive or cautious position, our operating environment requires us to adapt and change. When I meet the Island’s Financial Services leaders, we talk about the challenges their businesses face: a challenging jobs market as people seek to recruit excellent staff, technological change as industry seeks to digitise, and the global move towards tougher regulatory standards. Their challenges are our challenges. This Business Plan sets out our response.

"Our operating environment requires us to adapt and change"

Whilst we will continue to invest in technology to improve the ease of doing business with the JFSC, we know this also enables us to operate more efficiently. However, alongside technology we have to invest more in our people. In part this is to address the increased cost of living, but also, and more significantly, to respond to the expansion in the regulatory perimeter proposed by the Government of Jersey in response to international initiatives. Together these changes will increase our costs by £4.3m, resulting in a forecast deficit for FY23 of £2.2m, but because we have significant reserves, we will seek to recover these additional costs through fees arising from new registrations due to our expanded remit and a gradual increase in fees as opposed to a more sudden approach.

Our perimeter has been expanded as a consequence of new regimes such as VASPs, NPOs, etc. In addition, we have to respond to the increased complexity of the businesses we regulate as they digitise and innovate.

Our focus in 2023 will be the continued implementation of the Strategic Framework we launched in November 2021, which reaffirmed the centrality of combatting financial crime to our work. In pursuit of this we will focus on three core work streams, each linked to one of our strategic anchors (Business Integrity, Harnessing Technology, and Building a High-Performing Organisation) and three key initiatives designed to bring additional value to our finance industry by focusing on enhanced industry engagement, continuous improvement activities, and other regulatory improvements.

Of course, the continued development of the JFSC in 2023 will take place against the backdrop of the MONEYVAL inspection in Autumn this year. Across the organisation there has been a tremendous focus on preparing for this as well as strong engagement with Government, other agencies, and industry.

Shortly after we published our Business Plan for 2022, the JFSC appointed Jill Britton as its Director General. I want to take this opportunity to thank Jill and all the team at the JFSC for their resilience and commitment in the face of challenging circumstances. I know that they stand ready to take forward the work outlined in this Business Plan.