In April 2016, Jersey signed an agreement with the UK to improve the Island’s speed and accuracy when providing details of company owners to UK enforcement and tax authorities. This agreement means that Jersey resident companies now have until the end of June to confirm the beneficial ownership of their organisations and will be required to advise of any changes to beneficial ownership on an ongoing basis. This could pose a significant administrative challenge for Wealth Management Providers, which often manage hundreds, if not thousands of companies.

Many of the Wealth Management Providers we work with at C5 Alliance are now having to consider how best to tackle this requirement, and how to pay for it.  Do they absorb these costs or pass them onto their clients? Do they simply hire administrative support and provide data manually using the C17S form, or can technology solutions help?

Fortunately, due to some innovative forward-thinking from the Jersey Financial Services Commission (JFSC), there is now a new way to solve this problem.  For the first time, the JFSC will be providing an interface that allows trust companies to directly bulk upload data to the JFSC’s own systems. This is a fantastic investment in RegTech that could have much wider-reaching implications in terms of increasing speed, reducing costs and improving quality of data provision by financial services firms.

However, to take full advantage of, and benefit from this new opportunity provided by the JFSC, firms must get their own in-house reporting functionality in order. At C5, we have been working with several businesses to produce a simple solution that solves this problem. Our solution is designed to connect to any internal system, converting the data to the required format. It is then directly and instantly uploaded to the JFSC’s system for straight-through processing. The video below provides a short demo of the solution in action.

Regulation is an area of financial services that Jersey already has an excellent global reputation for. Our regulator is considered one of, if not the best, in the world. The fact that technology is now being used to make this aspect of our financial services offering even better provides a huge opportunity for the Island to differentiate itself from other jurisdictions, but also for local finance firms to improve efficiencies, while reducing the cost of compliance.

If you would like to arrange a private meeting to discuss Beneficial Ownership, please contact Samantha Rankin.