We are pleased to announce that our business has now reached the ripe old age of 1! It’s been an interesting first year, and we have ended up working on projects more diverse than our wildest expectations.
Amongst other projects, a key one was becoming a founding member of the Association of Data Protection Officers (ADPO) in Guernsey. With our Managing Director being both Chairman of ADPO and Vice Chairman of the Guernsey Investment Funds Association we are well positioned for the future.
We’ve even won our first award, which couldn’t have happened without such a great team in the office. A quick mention has to be made to Christopher, Sam & Rob for their efforts in the past 12 months and to you for your support.
To all of our existing clients, thank you for your custom over our first year and we look forward to working with you in the future. To all prospective clients, please feel free to contact us with your requirements. We will be pleased to assist!
Whilst this is a note to say thank you for being a part of the success of Midshore in its first year, we would also like to tell you more about the developments going on and a continued positive outlook to the rest of Midshore’s endeavours. So please read on.
Like all regulatory consultancies we work with local regulation… AML/CFT, Governance, POI, Pension Regulations, Beneficial Ownership, Data Protection and more. We specialise in implementing regulatory requirements, are adept at remediation, and can assist wherever your business may need it. Our background is in all of these areas, and with an experienced financial services director at the helm we truly understand governance. In addition to bespoke consultancy we are now able to offer a cost-effective fixed-price regulatory analysis services to help ensure that your business can identify gaps between your own operational and compliance monitoring processes and requirements under new or existing regulation.
What we additionally bring, which is unusual in the offshore consultancy space, is a true understanding and ability to work with international and foreign regulation and legislation. Yes, included in this we mean AIFMD, MiFID II/MiFIR, GDPR, FATCA, CRS and other cross-border pieces of regulation. Christopher has served on the Guernsey working parties for both AIFMD and MiFID II/MiFIR giving him a good insight to both, he has also been working on regulatory implementation projects since the EU Savings Directive in 2005.
We also understand foreign regulation, and can work with regulation in many jurisdictions, to give you a few examples:
The Channel Islands are International Financial Centres, this means not simply understanding our own regulatory regime but also the regulations that apply in the jurisdictions where our clients (and their clients) are based. This is going to be key to the ongoing growth of the islands. We can also provide assistance with Islamic Finance requirements.
Conversely, we can also work with foreign businesses to assist them with understanding the requirements of an offshore financial centre. To this end, Christopher will be in South Africa from 11th to 14th September with the intention of facilitating more South African originating funds business for Guernsey. We wish him every success in this.
As part of our international regulatory offering, we are pleased to bring our new Compass service to market.
The first phase of this will be a service offering information or assistance with selling, or registering for sale, offshore investment funds for sale in fifteen key international markets. This will be increased monthly so that by January 2018 we can offer this service in over fifty markets. This service will be specifically tailored to the type of offshore funds established in Guernsey or Jersey.
Phase Two will relate to the provision of investment services. Whilst this is largely being driven by the requirements of MiFID II and MiFIR we also intend to include other markets, such as South Africa under their FAIS regulation.
We expect to implement the third phase in late-2017 or early-2018; this will focus on markets that are more complex to invest into. Examples of this would be China (under the QFII, RQFII and Stock Connect regimes) and Saudi Arabia (QFI/QFIC).
Over time Compass will continue to evolve and identify other areas where we can provide a standardised service for assisting offshore businesses with accessing international markets.
View more information on Compass
As part of our ongoing evolution and expansion, we have added a fourth member, Billy Page, to our team.
Billy has a background working in various sectors of the financial services industry, a licensed online gambling firm and the local stock exchange. He brings a wide skillset including AML/CFT and bookkeeping to the team at Midshore, and will spend part of his time focusing on business development. Bringing in additional resource enables us to continue providing a high level of service to our expanding client base.
It’s also been a triumphant return back to the office for Rob Allen after a successful operation. Since his return, Rob has taken up the role of Client Relationship Manager and we hope he is keeping you all happy with our services and updates.
Whilst still in our first year, Midshore were pleased to be the recipient of the following award, which recognise the expertise we bring to the regulatory consulting market:
Awarded by Wealth And Finance International
We are also proud to have received confirmation of two more awards which we will be able to tell you about shortly!
