Standards Of Best Practice

As part of its on-going effort to promote principles of sound corporate governance within the supervised deposit-taking community, the Bank of Jamaica develops and issues to the industry, Standards of Best Practice in critical areas of licensee’s operations. Essentially, these ‘Standards’ provide clear guidance on supervisory expectations of Board and management in implementing appropriate systems to assess, measure, monitor and mitigate risks in identified operational areas. The Standards issued are:

Note:

  • The AML/CFT Guidance Notes were comprehensively revised in 2017 to, among other things, align them with the 2013 revisions that were made to The Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) and the POC (Money Laundering Prevention) Regulations, The Terrorism Prevention Act (TPA) and Reporting Entities Regulations under the TPA and with the passage in 2013 of the United Nations Security Council Implementation Act and Regulations thereunder. The Guidance Notes were also updated to take account of revisions to the applicable international standards. The updated Guidance Notes which benefitted from invaluable industry feedback, have been renamed “ Guidance Notes on the Prevention of Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism, Proliferation and Managing Related Risks” in keeping with the legislation described above. Therefore, in accordance with the statutory requirements for publication of these Guidance Notes, they were published in the gazette on 14 June 2018 and are therefore in effect.
  • The Management or Investment of Customers’ Funds
    This Standard gives effect to the statutory requirement (in accordance with legislative amendments in 2002) for each licensee to legally separate its deposit-taking activities from its off-balance sheet activities viz. managed funds operations and securities dealing. The Standard outlines the required framework for the orderly process of transfer or disposal of institution’s managed funds operations during the transition process, as well as delineates operational boundaries for separation of Trust facilities that are permissible under the Standard. Separation was deemed necessary to prevent the possible co-mingling of on-balance sheet deposit-taking operations with funds management activities, in light of the exponential growth in reported managed funds operations since 1995 vis-à-vis traditional banking activities, particularly at merchant banks. The separation exercise should mitigate the liquidity and other risks associated with co-mingling as well as facilitate the clear demarcations in supervisory responsibility of the Bank of Jamaica and the Financial Services Commission. As at 30 September 2003, all required separation exercises had been completed.

Prudential Reporting Requirements

Consistent with the Bank of Jamaica’s prudential reporting requirement regime, and in order to facilitate ease of data collection and compilation, specific schedules and returns have been developed and circulated, along with pertinent Explanatory Notes to the industry (the Central Bank has also made available to the industry a browser based application to enable the electronic submission of the returns). These returns along with their reporting frequency are detailed in the table below.

RETURNS

SUBMISSION DUE DATES

Monthly Balance Sheet

7 business days after return end date

Loans and Deposits Flow

10 business days after return end date

Maturity Profile and Repricing Gap

10 business days after return end date

Payments

15 calendar days after return end date

Quarterly

21 calendar days after return end date