Q&A with Annemarie Hughes, Director/Head of Private Client, Trusts & Pensions at DQ Advocates

What’s your vision for the Isle of Man employee benefits cluster?

I think it’s going to be a very good resource. Primarily, it’s going to be a good marketing tool for the Isle of Man because the Island is very good at international employee benefits in different sectors. Different industries have vast experience in different areas, but the cluster is about centralising all that information and all those services in one place and being able to market it from that central point.

We all know we have a lot of experience to offer. For example, the Isle of Man is THE place for international pensions but there’s nothing out there to say that. It has all been a bit piecemeal in the past and the different industries had different events and different marketing strategies to bring in new business. There was no central place where you could look for any of these services. Now, with Employee Benefits Isle of Man, it will be helpful to bring all those services together in one place. My vision is to have a single source of information where all that the Island has to offer can be accessed.

Are any of the other jurisdictions offering a similar type of cluster arrangement in this space?

Not that I am aware of. The Channel Islands have always been very good at marketing themselves and they do have marketing efforts in this area, but I don’t think they have anything centralised like this.

As a professional based here what do you think the Island has to offer in this context?

I think it’s the level of experience of the relevant sectors. There’s a lot of experience out there with businesses that have been providing these kinds of services for a very long time. People don’t move around too much. The Island doesn’t generally have a high staff turnover and so they’ve built up good longstanding relationships, which in many of the areas of business we are talking about, is very important.  For example, in trust and private client work in this kind of space, having a trusted and established relationship is key.

Regulation is also a particularly strong area for the Isle of Man. With regard to pensions for example, it’s not only the trustee of the scheme which is regulated, the scheme itself is also vetted. Those kinds of regulations have been in place for more than 20 years so it’s a long-standing and established system that’s always evolving. It’s won many awards over the years for due diligence around its finance sector governance and that is something the government has protected and nurtured. In short, we’ve got good foundations.

We have people with a lot of expertise; robust regulations and a great reputation – all those elements together make a good offering. It's nothing new because we’ve all been doing this work for decades, it’s just that we can now bring everything together. We’ll be working from a very strong core. You have insurance, pensions, and law for example, but there will also be new areas like wellbeing, and that’s a real growth area.

Is there a specific type or size of business that would benefit the most from the scheme?

I don’t think there is one sector, or one size of company that will benefit. For multinationals it is already proving attractive because they have employees in different countries all over the world. However, with the advent of flexible and remote working that trend is going to continue and start to affect companies of all sizes. A strong selling point is that if you have employees working out of several different countries, it’s easier and more cost-effective to have all your services centralised in one place. That is no longer something that is unique to the larger multinationals. You can now apply this same principle across a wide range of industries and different sized companies. It could be a leveller and real game-changer because, in theory, it means that smaller organisations will be able to compete in terms of employee packages on a level playing field with the big PLCs. It’ll help them provide the sort of services they have struggled to provide in the past.

Do you think the diversity of expertise on the Island is going to be beneficial in attracting business?

Absolutely. It started off as insurance and pensions, but it’s widened to include a lot to HR professionals (they’ve set up the International Employee Benefits Association branch in the Isle of Man as an off shoot of the cluster). It’s interesting to have all these different types of businesses working together for the first time. Before it was more disjointed, you wouldn’t have thought of putting them together. It could be set for real growth because there must be other service providers out there who might spring up along the way. The more people we can get involved the better.

DQ is part of a pioneering team tasked with helping with the launch, how do you envisage your firm’s involvement in these early stages?

We work with the insurers and pension advisers. For example, if they want to create a new scheme, we’ll help them to draft up the documents and give advice on legal questions with the ongoing administration. We can also liaise with the tax office on their behalf. We provide all the legal services, deal with questions around regulation and compliance, and draft robust but fair terms and conditions for insurers. There’s a lot of different aspects to it.

What process did DQ go through to become involved in the cluster?

I reached out to Isle of Man Finance to ask if there was anything we could do as a law firm to help market the Isle of Man with regard to pensions. We already give up our time as a firm to government working groups and industry bodies because we just think that’s the right thing to do. We try and promote the Isle of Man before we promote the firm, that’s always been our outlook. If the Isle of Man is doing well, everyone is doing well. There’s enough work to go around and that is just how we look at it.

As the cluster evolves, what will be the benefits for the Isle of Man?

This sector will grow, it must because of the way in which employment has changed and is still evolving. As that happens there is going to be growth in the need for these kinds of services. Especially around flexible working and internationally mobile employees, I don’t think we’ve even started to harness the potential yet. There are going to be elements we haven’t even discussed, such as how tech can play a part in the project. These elements will naturally evolve because of having the cluster. The important thing is that we are now all talking to each other from different industries. Having those conversations and making sure we are all pulling together in the same direction, that can only be a good thing. It will naturally grow and evolve. Ultimately the plan and hope is that it brings more employment opportunities, more work and more jobs – that’s the ultimate goal for the Island’s economy. The mindset is about helping the Isle of Man as a priority and the benefits will trickle down.

You present papers at international and domestic conferences; will those events help to spread the word to the wider business community?

Absolutely. Recently we were in London because we co-sponsored the Private Client Dining Club dinner and we were on a panel with Isle of Man Finance. That was an opportunity to talk about the Isle of Man generally and I was able to add some information about the employee benefits cluster. That’s exactly what I would do as a matter of course and we look forward to continuing to promote the cluster and the Isle of Man more widely.