Jersey is half-way through a programme of changes to the way its regulators supervise the financial sector and its latest business plan acknowledges this.

Over the course of 2016 Jersey will be taking a new approach to supervision itself and undertaking a wholesale restructuring of the supervision divisions of the Jersey Financial Services Commission. The regulator will evolve an increasingly risk-based method of doing things and refashion itself on an entity-based, as opposed to licence-based, supervisory model. It plans to allocate its supervisory resources towards areas or firms that it identifies as 'higher risk,' identifying important problems and, hopefully, fixing them. There is to be a new Supervisory Risk Unit. Communications between the JFSC and firms are to be 'digitised.'

To attract and keep people of high quality - a big problem for any regulator, as financial regulators the world over pay their staff little compared with the salaries and bonuses proffered by the firms they are supervising, while also allowing them to join those firms afterwards - the regulator is upturning its 'human resources' policy. It wants more flexible working practices, a greater emphasis on 'performance management' (which in such a nebulous world as regulation might well backfire) and a more creative way of recruiting people. It staged a successful career fair recently.

Writing of a "heavy workload to maintain business as usual," the JFSC makes it sound as though Jersey is losing business. Its desire (which it expresses in the report) of 'enhancing taxpayer protection,' presumably from the depredations of onshore tax authorities, might raise a few eyebrows in London.

The commission was thinking of performing a major funds regime review, but after some discussions with its political masters, the businesses on the island and Jersey Finance, the local financial promotional agency, it is declining to frame an entirely new funds regime and instead is taking an evolutionary approach that focuses on "key individual fund initiatives."

Regulators are also plannning to consult the financial sector about whether to embark on the onerous journey that will allow the island to 'seek equivalence,' i.e. to be accepted by the European Union as a jurisdiction with a regime 'equivalent' to that being imposed onshore by the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive. Cyber-security is another priority for the JFSC, but its pronouncements on it are vague. The same is true of regulatory plans to make the relevant banks obey the Basel III prudential standards and the EU's fourth money-laundering directive, notably for the latter by undertaking an island-wide AML risk assessment.

Further work is needed on a collaboration with the central part of the Government over the introduction of the Security Interests Register. The JFSC is also looking at 'Global Legal Entity Identifiers,' which sound rather like beneficial ownership registers by-the-back-door, and "the potential of...charities registers," which makes it sound as though registered charities - long a force in national life on the mainland - have not yet appeared on the island. Jersey is a world centre for philanthropic wealth management.