Making a complaint about the JFSC

Complaints about flaws in our work or failings in the way we behave help us to critically review what we do and identify ways to improve.

We will consider complaints about:

flaws in the way we work
failings in the way we have behaved.

We will prioritise complaints that allege unethical behaviour by a member of our staff. In such cases, we will ensure that the staff member is treated fairly, while we consider the complaint.

If you have a complaint about our Chair, Director General or members of our Commission Board, contact the Commission Secretary who will appoint an unrelated senior member of staff to manage your complaint.

Every year, we report on how we handle complaints without explicitly identifying complainants, employees or regulated businesses.

Complaining about a financial services business

If you want to complain about the services you have received from a regulated business, the proper route is to raise it initially with the business.

After that, the Channel Islands Financial Ombudsman, Jersey Office of the Information Commissioner or the Jersey Courts may be appropriate routes to pursue grievances with regulated businesses.

We are unable to consider such grievances as complaints.

Making a complaint against a regulated financial services business

How to complain

If you want to make a complaint, you can either:

send us an email with “Complaint” as the subject line to complaints@jerseyfsc.org
write us a letter addressed to: Complaints, Commission Secretary, Jersey Financial Services Commission, 14-18 Castle Street, St Helier, Jersey, JE4 8TP. This will help ensure that your complaint is not mistaken for other correspondence.
call us on (01534) 822000 and we will arrange a convenient time for you to come into our offices to discuss your complaint.

Describe your complaint in your own words and include copies of any relevant documents, if they support your grievance. Summarise what you think suggests a flaw in how we do our work or a failing in how we have behaved. We will contact you for any additional information if we need to.

You need to make it very clear that you are complaining by either writing to us or by having a meeting with us specifically to make a complaint.

Having an informal conversation with a member of our staff in any setting is not an appropriate way to complain.

Processing and outcome

We will acknowledge your complaint within five working days and provide you with a reference number which you will need to quote in any subsequent correspondence. If you don’t hear from us, contact us on (01534) 822000 to ask for an update.
We will initially review your complaint to determine whether it can be dealt with promptly or requires further investigation. A senior member of staff, who isn’t directly involved in the matter you have complained about, will oversee this.
When we have reviewed your complaint, we will let you know our conclusion, unless it could compromise a separate regulatory process. If that's the case, we will usually wait until we conclude the process before we send you our final response to your complaint.

Types of outcome

If, from our preliminary review, we decide that we don't need to carry out an extended investigation, our final response will explain the factors we identified which led to that conclusion.
If we decide to carry out an extended investigation, we will let you know and, when we send you our final feedback, we will let you know whether your complaint has highlighted matters of regulatory concern. We will also send you a summary of the reasons for our conclusion and explain how we intend to fix the problem.

Prompt investigation

We will let you know the factors which led us concluding that we will not carry out an extended investigation of your complaint.

Extended investigation

We will tell you if your complaint has highlighted matters of regulatory concern
We will give you reasons for our conclusion
We will tell you how we intend to do better in future.

What will not happen

Reimbursement
We do not have the statutory power to reimburse you or make a business reimburse you.
Sharing of confidential information
We can't disclose confidential matters about regulated businesses which means we may not be able to give you all the details of our decision.
Admission of liability
Everything we say in the outcome of our review is ‘without the admission of liability’. Our complaints process is informal and designed to improve regulatory outcomes.

Non-complaints

Some matters shouldn't be raised as complaints:

Whistleblowing
Call (01534) 887557.
Suspected breach of regulatory requirements
Report a breach by a regulated business by emailing us or calling (01534) 822000.
Subject Access Request
Find more information about our data protection policy and subject access requests.
Suggestions
We are happy to receive suggestions to improve our standards. Direct your suggestions to one of our directors.
Unhappy with your supervision
If you are a regulated business and you are not happy with your supervisory engagement, discuss it with your supervisor and, if necessary, escalate the matter to their manager.

There are certain matters which members of the public, regulated businesses or other affected parties might want to complain about that we can't consider as complaints, including:

We might make a decision that affects a regulated business. If the business is unhappy about the decision, the proper route is to appeal through the Jersey Courts.
We will not consider complaints from regulated businesses or individuals under regulatory investigation, or those who have been informed that there is a prospect of investigation, until we conclude our investigations.
We are unable to review criminal allegations as complaints. We will respond to let you know what to do next and we may decide to report the matter directly to the police.

Further correspondence and appeals

Once we have given our conclusion, we will only consider further correspondence if you can demonstrate, to our satisfaction, that our conclusion is factually inaccurate in an important way and that you can provide evidence to demonstrate that factual inaccuracy.
If you want to appeal our decision, you can write to our Chair to ask for another review. We will undertake a further review only when the Board of Commissioners is satisfied that your complaint has disclosed evidence of unethical actions by a member of our staff. Equally we will review your complaint again if we don't satisfactorily dispel concerns about it. If the Chair believes there are reasonable grounds for appeal, he/she will appoint a single Commissioner to review your complaint. The Commissioner will then decide whether or not to recommend an alternative conclusion to the Board of Commissioners.

FAQs on Complaints

Why did your examinations not find the problem with my account?

While our supervisory processes involve inspecting client records, we only review these on a sample basis. This is to help us assess the quality of a business' controls for a reasonable level of assurance. It won't give us complete assurance that all the business' transactions are appropriate. Based on this, it is quite possible for a business' controls to appear strong but clients still suffer losses.

If I have suffered loss from a regulated business, what will you do if I complain about it?

If you are complaining about an issue that our supervisory processes are designed to spot, we will prioritise your complaint. In this scenario, we will check our inspection records of the relevant financial services provider to see whether we examined your file. If we did not, we will let you know that your file was not reviewed by us when we advise you that we are not proceeding to a substantive examination of your complaint.

In the event that we did inspect your client file, we will consider why we didn't spot the alleged problem and whether your case indicates a flaw in our methodology.

You didn’t act quickly enough even though you knew there was a problem with my financial services provider and I lost money because you were slow. Why didn’t you tell them to give me back my money?

When we are aware of a possible breach of our regulatory requirements, we will – if we are doing our job well – move quickly to get the business to stop its misconduct.

We do not use our powers to direct regulated businesses to reimburse clients or compensate them for loss. This is not our role. In some circumstances, the Channel Islands Financial Ombudsman or the Jersey Courts may be able to help.

If you are seeking redress of this kind, because you're not satisfied with the regulated business, you either need to make a complaint to the Channel Islands Financial Ombudsman (if eligible) or initiate a court action.