Talking exclusively to WealthBriefing, Peter Niven, the outgoing chief executive of Guernsey Finance, outlines why he is handing over responsibility for promoting the island’s financial industry at a particularly exciting time.

Talking exclusively to WealthBriefing, Peter Niven, the outgoing chief executive of Guernsey Finance, outlines why he is handing over responsibility for promoting the island’s financial industry at a particularly exciting time.

At the end of this month, Peter Niven will step down as chief executive of Guernsey Finance after six years in the role. He has presided over turbulent times for international financial centres, which came in for ceaseless (and largely ill-informed) vitriol against so-called tax havens following the financial crisis. But his tenure has also seen Guernsey at the forefront of various innovations – and the tiny island is showing no signs of letting up in its efforts to provide the financial and legal sectors with new tools to serve an ever-changing client base.

Guernsey Finance has named technical director and deputy chief executive Fiona Le Poidevin as its new CEO, having lured her from a career as a senior tax manager just over a year ago. Niven (who is going to remain with Guernsey Finance as a consultant until the end of this year) is handing over the reins at a particularly exciting time in the island’s evolution, and it seems that Le Poidevin will have her hands full promoting two new pieces of legislation which promise to be big business for the island.

Big business

One of the new developments in question is the forthcoming introduction of Guernsey Foundations, the first of which are expected to be deployed at the start of next year (an article dealing with Guernsey Foundations in-depth is to follow). Even more exciting, however, is the island’s new legislation on image rights – and it seems Guernsey has plenty to shout about here.

Guernsey is overhauling its intellectual property regime to offer better image rights protection for celebrities.  Set to enter the statute books this autumn, in essence the new legislation will formalise the concept of image rights, making them registrable and therefore giving high-profile individuals the right to protect the use of their name, image or likeness, and of course to protect their right to the financial proceeds arising from any such use. Here, Guernsey is truly leading the world as, broadly-speaking, celebrities only currently have recourse to a rag-bag of rights such as false endorsement, defamation and privacy. Formally defined and registrable image rights are clearly sorely needed and, as a jurisdiction used to punching above its weight on the world stage, Guernsey is happy to step into the breach.

Niven concedes that other jurisdictions are likely to overhaul their IP regimes to keep pace with Guernsey’s, but for the time being he expects his particular bailiwick to enjoy significant first-mover advantage.

As a veteran promoter of Guernsey’s charms as a financial and legal services innovator, Niven speaks on good authority in outlining the competitive advantage the island will get in being “first past the post” on image rights. He notes that when the island introduced Protected Cell Companies in 1997 the concept was seized on by its competitors “immediately”, but Guernsey remained the “go to” jurisdiction for the structure. “Because we were first we were seen as leaders and the ones who really understood the product,” he said. Niven expects things to pan out similarly when Guernsey starts registering the stars’ image rights towards the end of 2012. “We’ve spent years on this and canvassed widely on how to frame the legislation,” he continued.

It’s no overstatement to say that business will be booming in Guernsey once the world’s glitterati start realising the benefits of registering their image rights on the island. Put simply, the legislation aims to protect a person from the unfair commercial exploitation of their image, but there are of course huge synergies with Guernsey’s existing legal and financial services expertise. Once celebrities have registered their image it will in effect become another asset which can be structured in any number of ways – even bequeathed in whole or part.

A “digital island”

Guernsey is spearheading image rights as part of a broader drive to diversify the island’s economy and reduce its reliance on “pure” financial services. “Guernsey wants to be less reliant on financial services at a time when the world’s economies are on their uppers,” Niven said. Other areas the island is forging ahead in are online gaming and data storage and streaming – all of which can be developed despite Guernsey’s space and population constraints (it is just 25 square miles in total and has a population under 65,000). “Guernsey wants to become a more digital island…space and therefore people is our challenge so we need industries which are high-value but low-footprint,” he continued.

For the time being however Guernsey is bracing itself for a deluge of new business related to its image rights legislation, and Niven is confident that it has been kept sufficiently under wraps to preserve the island’s advantage (the legislation will be fully in the public domain later this month). “Image rights has been kept relatively low-profile… of course, there is an amount of leakage, but not so much that other jurisdictions can get fully ahead of us,” he said.

Niven, along with several other legal experts who have spoken to WealthBriefing, predicts that Singapore will most likely be the next jurisdiction to launch image rights – the country already has a forward-thinking IP regime in place and its government is committed to driving new initiatives. “They have a huge will to do more - the government is really behind it all... Singapore has always tried to make itself the Switzerland of the Far East and they have the hunger to achieve that,” said Niven.

But for the foreseeable future Guernsey will be able to bask in the glory of being the very first jurisdiction to take sufficient note of the fact that we now live in a celebrity-mad, endorsement-driven world where “image” is a truly bankable asset. It’s also fair to predict that the whole spectrum of Guernsey’s legal and financial services experts will see a huge influx of business off the back of the new legislation. “Other jurisdictions simply haven’t got the whole suite of options we do,” Niven continued.

Nor should the PR benefits of the new legislation on image rights (and foundations) be underestimated, he concludes. “Following these developments Guernsey will be very firmly on the map as an innovator providing what clients need, and what their advisors need,” he said. He may no longer be CEO of Guernsey Finance, but Niven will evidently remain a passionate advocate of this tiny island’s attractions for the foreseeable future.

Over the years Peter Niven has been very active in giving his thoughts to WealthBriefing and its sister publications, we would like to take this opportunity to thank him for his contributions and wish him well in his future endeavours.