Business Plan 2024

Introduction

Welcome to our 2024 business plan, where we share with you the JFSC’s priorities and goals for the year ahead.

Our vision is to be “a high performing regulator, building for the long-term success of Jersey.” Achieving this depends on us having a strong, engaged and productive relationship with the finance industry and Jersey’s wider community. Our business plan plays an important part in this engagement process.

A key focus for 2024 will be the outcome of Jersey’s Moneyval assessment. The results will be published in July of this year, following the onsite assessment in October 2023.

2024 is also the final year of our current strategy. Therefore in addition to addressing the outcome of Jersey’s Moneyval assessment, we will also continue to focus on supporting business integrity, digital transformation and our people strategy, in particular our organisational capability and capacity for the future.

A further core priority for 2024 will be balancing our focus on financial crime prevention with our focus on conduct and prudential risks. We will support the Government of Jersey with the introduction of a consumer lending conduct regime and develop our regulatory framework and bank supervision as appropriate in line with Basel III.

Chair's statement

Our organisation has been through a period of growth, change and modernisation to make sure we are positioned effectively to meet Jersey’s needs. This includes managing an expanded regulatory perimeter to meet international standards in combatting financial crime.

From our sustained focus on digital innovation to our evolving approach to people and culture, we have listened to industry’s feedback and are taking substantial action. The next stage is to work with industry and stakeholders to embed the significant regulatory changes and new regimes introduced over the past two years to ensure ongoing effectiveness.

We continue to be in a time of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, with ongoing energy and food supply chain issues, inflation, tight monetary policy, more restrictive credit conditions and climate change all having a significant impact at a personal, professional, national and global level. Conflicts on several fronts and increased tensions in geopolitical relationships continue to impact the global picture.

We are seeing green shoots however, with the stabilisation of inflation in several economies. The importance of, and need for, international cooperation and coordination have only increased, as financial services become increasingly borderless.

 At a local level, higher interest rates and the cost-of-living crisis also continue to have an impact. The complexity of doing business has increased, as has the demand for talent to manage an expanded regulatory perimeter. These are both challenges which we share with our industry stakeholders.

The flipside of the current economic environment is that investors are looking for stability in an uncertain world, and Jersey offers that regulatory stability. We are experiencing headwinds, but the picture isn’t uniform. 2023 saw bank deposits and overall fund values increase, but a dip in some of our transaction activity in Supervision and Registry. The environment is challenging, but we’re well positioned as a jurisdiction, as a regulator, and as an industry to come through this.

We are committed to innovation to ensure our success and longevity as a well-regarded international finance centre, providing industry with the new products and services that it needs to be competitive. We do this by working in close collaboration with the Government of Jersey, Digital Jersey, Jersey Finance, other agencies and industry. We’re seeing this approach bear fruit, particularly in the areas of RegTech and Digital ID.

Looking ahead, environmental, social and governance (ESG) remains an important consideration for the JFSC, both as an organisation and as a regulator. Internally we have aligned our ESG approach to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In 2024 we will continue to collect baseline data so we can set specific, measurable and time-bound ESG targets and report on our work to the required auditable standard.

We will support the Government of Jersey’s focus on consumer lending conduct to protect islanders from poor practices, a particularly important area given the current socioeconomic environment. We will also be concluding a fee review in consultation with industry, delivered by an external and independent provider following a tender process. More broadly, we will continue our horizon scanning to stay abreast of global regulatory developments and continue to build on our external stakeholder engagement programme.

2024 is the last year of our current strategic framework. It’s therefore important for us to continue to drive through delivery on our core workstreams, which include combatting financial crime together, digital transformation, evolving our people strategy to focus on organisational capability and capacity, and achieving balance with an increased focus on conduct and prudential risks. Work will also begin this year to develop the next stage of our strategy, which will be delivered from 2025 under the leadership of our new Chair.

2023 was a significant year for the whole community of Jersey, as we welcomed the Moneyval assessment team to the island to complete their review of our technical compliance and the effectiveness of Jersey’s measures to counter money laundering, the financing of terrorism and proliferation financing.

Led by the Government of Jersey and supported by the JFSC, so many islanders have contributed to this process and while we cannot comment on the outcome until the Moneyval report is public in July this year, I would like to thank everyone involved for their continued hard work. The goal now is to maintain the pace and collaboration we have seen between the JFSC, Government and other agencies throughout the Moneyval assessment process to deliver on our top strategic priority of regulatory effectiveness and combatting financial crime. Our commitment to this top strategic priority preceded, and will continue beyond, the Moneyval assessment.

In October Mark Hoban retired as Chair and Commissioner of the JFSC. We thank Mark for his exemplary leadership, his central role in setting our strategy to future-proof the JFSC, his stewardship throughout the build-up to the Moneyval assessment, and commitment to the highest standards of corporate governance. The process to appoint the new Chair is well advanced and we look forward to welcoming them in the near future.