CAYMAN FUNDS | 2017
“Part of our role is to
help the international
finance community better
understand Cayman’s
position.” Jennifer Collins
Collins: Our distance from the larger centres can be a driver for
companies retaining talent longer here. Cayman is a great place to
live and people want to stay here. If you talk to service providers in
big cities, they often lose their talented staff to investment managers
where people can be on the other side of the deal.
In Cayman, for the most part, we are largely service providers and
there are fewer opportunities to move into investment management.
Because of this, we have much less turnover and our staff tend to
have more experience than their counterparts elsewhere. We end up
with great senior people in positions here in Cayman, people who
stay because of the attraction of the lifestyle and because their peers
in their firms and at the other service providers are also senior, bright
people they enjoy doing business with.
This raises the quality of talent you’re dealing with when you talk
to a service provider based in Cayman versus an equivalent service
provider based in a large centre onshore.
Jacob: I presented to a director’s organisation that’s not represented
here—of the 10 people in the room, eight of them were former EY.
I thought ‘what’s happening here, why are all these people ex-EY?’.
It gets back to the point that Jennifer and Jude have raised which is
that Cayman’s a great place to live and work.
consistent messaging about the real value of Cayman directors and
how the governance structure in Cayman adds to it. The feedback I
get is those who are familiar with it really see the excellence provided
by the Cayman Islands governance sector and a lot of that comes
from the varied depth and experience that exists here.
What we don’t always do a great job of is explaining how that diversity
of structure and service providers and size of entities and governance
models works in conjunction with the nature and complexity of the
clients they’re serving. Sometimes it is quite confusing and it sounds
as though one’s better than the other but really as a jurisdiction we
are figuring out how to manage and actually run the whole gamut,
to provide the full selection that works best for each of our clients to
maintain that high standard of excellence.
What about talent? Does the
industry have a potential problem
looming?
Scott: We’re uniquely placed and as Monette shared earlier, we’re
actually a great place to do business and live. The quality of life here
is tremendous and we’re going to get better in communicating that
and continuing to attract the top talent that’s out there. We’re also
working on initiatives, for example, we’re going to be launching a
fintech working group because when we look at not only where we
are now, but where the industry’s moving forward, fintech is going
to become a very important part of the future.
On the one hand the talent is finding us but we’re also collectively doing
a lot more work in connecting with the talent, and attracting them to the
jurisdiction. With fintech for example, there’s a tremendous amount of
desire to look at the legislative framework in Cayman, the legislation that’s
been put through to protect IP, copyrights, etc. What I’m seeing is we’re
going to be a prime jurisdiction for attracting and retaining that talent.