Why would you say that ordinary people don’t always perceive the value that the financial industry adds to the community in Jersey?
“There is a fundamental problem that all forms of financial services have, and that is that ordinary working people – and I mean it in the best sense of the word – don’t have experience of sophisticated financial services and are not billionaires.
“We have often described how the financial services industry contributes hundreds of millions in tax receipts, or how we support half the employment in the island with 30,000 directly employed in our industry and a further 13,000 employed through the required support services.
“But we find that these big numbers don’t resonate particularly well with ordinary people, because they bear no relation to their lives – they just sound big and people can’t understand how they got there.
“So we feel we’ve got to find a more straightforward way of explaining the value we add, and then support it with powerful statistics such as the fact that we generate around 60% of our government’s tax revenue both through the tax that businesses pay and through that paid by the employees, which is enough to pay for our health and education services in their entirety.
“We’re building a new secondary school and a new hospital in the next 10 years – something rare in times when governments are strapped for cash.”
The new narrative is also aimed at boosting the image of the sector in order to attract young people. Are you struggling to inject fresh blood into the industry?
“No, we’re not but we want to make sure we’re never in that position in the future. We have around 1,000 children a year coming out of our education system each year. Around a decade ago, before we started working on education, of that 1,000 around 100 would come into our industry either at an A-level stage or as university graduates coming back to the island. We’ve now moved that figure to an average of 300 a year.
“The way we’ve done that is by specifically do school liaisons, go into school and explain in straightforward terms what the industry does and what jobs it offers because many young people sometimes think that financial services are all about numbers and spreadsheets, when in fact much of it is about client relationship management, it can be about human resources, IT, marketing – there’s a raft of career choices available.
We have already improved the uptake considerably, but what we don’t want to happen is for this situation to be harmed by adverse commentary on our industry or pejorative soundbites from newspapers.”
Another objective of the initiative is to get financial support and assistance from the Jersey government. Why does the industry need it?
“We’ve encouraged our government on a business plan-led basis to support our work financially because it’s the majority of their revenue, so if this industry is successful, our government tax revenues increase and so does their ability to provide services and prosperity for their citizens is enhanced through its success.
“If we encourage people in China or Dubai to do business with Jersey, the consequence is you have more jobs and a greater tax take, which can fund pension and social welfare budgets which are rising with our ageing population.
“We appreciate funding is just under £5m ($6.4m, €5.4m), but in the overall scheme of things the industry contributes to our economy little over £300m in tax receipts, so we think that’s a relatively reasonable investment for the government to secure that revenue and indeed grow it.”
