On 7th February 2025, the AICP welcomed 249 compliance, risk and governance professionals to its 20th Manx State of the Nation conference at the Comis Hotel.
This year’s conference was sponsored by PwC Isle of Man for the 11th year, and Impact Professional Services was honoured to once again sponsor the breakfast and coffee breaks at our favourite event on the compliance calendar.
Here are our personal highlights from the day.
An Introduction to and update from the IOM Information Commissioner.
This was a refreshing, very honest and informative session where the new Information Commissioner, Alexandra Delaney Bhattacharya, shared some of the current challenges, not least because the role has been vacant for some time.
It was interesting to learn that whilst the Isle of Man’s Information Commission has 5 team members, their counterpart in Guernsey has a staff of 12 and Jersey 19.
Alexandra shared her proposed vision that “The Isle of Man is the safest place in the world for personal data”, but that there is work to do.
A programme of outreach is planned, to help the 26,000 businesses on island understand their obligations around data protection and whether or not they should be registered with the Information Commissioners Office. Currently only 3,000 are registered.
Alexandra also shared some early observations including:
- There is a focus on reactive work (there are high volumes of casework)
- There’s an opportunity to do much more engagement and think about how they communicate with industry
- There is currently little engagement with the private sector, with a perception among some that the Commission is ‘closed off’
- They are under resourced
- There is little effort to promote responsible data-driven innovation
- The website isn’t user friendly
- There is little accountability (no annual report)
Alexandra talked about where her focus will be in the initial months, and the slides from the presentation share more detail and make for interesting reading. You can find them here.
IOM PLC: People, Business & Risk
Maria Bridson from Bridson Halsall Advocates led a very thought provoking (and at times shocking) session on modern slavery and people trafficking.
The session was very well received, with a swell of support from the room demonstrating that as compliance and risk professionals we’re very much on board with Maria – recognising we all have a responsibility in this area.
Maria is shining a spotlight on the plight of modern-day slaves and is encouraging businesses to drive awareness of human trafficking crimes through organisational wide training and encouraging an active commitment to preventing it.
Should modern day slavery and human trafficking have its own policy, in the same way we have AML, CFT and Proliferation Financing policies and guidance?
As people, and as businesses we need to proactively commit to preventing modern day slavery and human trafficking, because it is happening. And it’s sometimes shockingly close to home.
There are some useful links in Maria’s slides which you can find here.
Proliferation and Proliferation Finance
We also enjoyed Erica Humphries’ engaging presentation on Proliferation and Proliferation Finance. The slides from the session are excellent and provide a good overview of key definitions, and factors to be aware of – specifically in the Isle of Man.
This is a particularly useful overview from the presentation:
And we encourage you to view the rest of the slides here.
All in all a very useful, engaging and insightful day where we enjoyed catching up with many of you.
In case you missed anything, all the slides are now available on the AICP MSOTN website here.
Same time, same place next year?
