The Crystal team’s regular snapshot of some of the points of note for finance and corporate comms pros from around the jurisdictions this past month…

• Jersey: Jersey politicians are pushing to undertake further consultation with the private sector over gender pay gap reporting
• Luxembourg: a new salary guide for Luxembourg has shown that the IT and finance sectors remain the country’s highest paid sectors
• Dubai: a number of new initiatives have been announced by the DIFC, including the launch of a new DIFC Funds Centre to help scale up funds and support the wider growth of Dubai’s asset management sector
• BVI: amendments tothe BVI Business Companies Act received governor’s assent last month, with the Act being gazetted on 26 September
• Cayman: Fears of a ‘brain drain’ in IFCs was underlined this month in Cayman. It’s something that is mirrored in other island locations and is driven by cost of living and lack of opportunities
• Luxembourg: Luxembourg for Finance’s new CEO Tom Theobald has outlined his vision for the jurisdiction
• Cayman: more than 30,000 funds are now registered in Cayman, a new record. According to the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, there were 30,038 registered investment funds in Cayman as of 4 Sept. Of that, 17,080 were private funds and 12,958 were mutual funds.
• Children and smart phones: the use of smart phones in schools continues to rise up the agenda – Luxembourg’s Parliament signed off on a petition last month calling for a ban on smartphones in public schools, whilst schools in Jersey and Guernsey have also restricted or banned their use
• BBC: up to 115 editorial and production jobs are to be cut by the BBC across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, it was announced
• X-odus: figures suggest that users of X in both the US and UK are falling fast – figures from SimilarWeb show that active daily users in the UK have dropped from 8m a year ago to around 5.6m today, whilst in the US that figure has dopped by about a fifth in the same time period
• UK Budget: the build-up to the new UK government’s budget on 30 October continued, through the Labour Party conference – there continues to be a lot of talk around the treatment of non-doms and carried interest, and there may well be implications for IFCs