JONATHAN WHITING is regulatory advisory senior manager with PwC Isle of Man.

Here he discusses a compliance survey, just launched by PwC, in collaboration with the Alliance of Isle of Man Compliance Professionals [AICP].

Earlier this year I sat down with representatives from the AICP and discussed the many challenges and new regulations facing compliance professionals in the financial services and egaming industries, including MONEYVAL, beneficial ownership disclosure, PSD2, [Payment Services Directive] and not least GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation].

It was clear that as a jurisdiction we have little insight into the current state of compliance in the Isle of Man and how compliance teams are weathering these challenges.

From this, our Isle of Man-focused State of Compliance Survey was born - an exciting development in understanding the issues and challenges facing risk and compliance professionals.

The inaugural survey has been compiled in conjunction with the Education Committee of the AICP and is designed to give compliance teams the benchmarking data they need to reflect common industry practices today and to plan for more effective, more efficient compliance operations in the future.

We hope that it will generate good debate and provide insight.

We have deliberately made the survey as broad as possible in this first year, covering all the regulated sectors in the Isle of Man.

The survey questions are structured to cover the areas of strategy, business management and business oversight elements of the PwC Compliance and Ethics Framework which we introduced at the 2017 State of the Nation conference.

It was recently identified in PwC’s 2017 Global Risk in Review Survey that the engagement of senior management (first line of defence) is vital to ensure risk decisions are aligned with strategy.

In that Risk in Review survey, 63 per cent of respondents said that shifting risk management responsibilities to the front line made their companies better at anticipating and mitigating risk events.

Accordingly, we have posed questions about senior management involvement in the local survey, and look forward to drawing conclusions from the responses to it.

In 2015 the Isle of Man regulatory system changed, with the birth of the Isle of Man Financial Services Authority when the FSC and IPA joined together.

A number of questions have been included in the survey about levels of contact with the regulators, amounts of information requested and some more subjective questions.

We anticipate that there will be a range of responses, but will attempt to distil them into meaningful feedback which will be of help to both the regulator and the regulated.

It’s early days for those regulated under the new Designated Business regulation, and it will be interesting to contrast their responses with those in the more ‘mature sectors’.

Going forward, we see the emergence of Regulatory Technology - or ‘RegTech’ for short - as one of the most exciting developments in compliance.

We have included some questions to check the progress of local firms on their RegTech journey, and look forward to seeing the levels of future-proofing being achieved. Much of the current financial services regulation predates the fourth industrial revolution, so we are interested in respondents’ views of the future.

The disruptors and innovators will forge ahead, and regulated entities will have to establish a strategy that enables them to keep up.

If you would like to respond to the survey, go to www.pwc.com/im/iomstateofcompliancesurvey.

Remember that all responses will be aggregated and anonymised. I look forward to the debate that will be generated from the results, which will be presented at the AICP State of the Nation conference, sponsored by PwC, in early February. Anyone who feels the impact of change on their business is free to call me for a chat before or during completion of the survey, and I am happy to meet up to discuss responses or ways of enhancing the survey for next time.

Call me on 689689 or email-