Cayman Finance has launched a quarterly survey of business sentiment in the financial services industry.
The industry association is cooperating with the Cayman Islands Legal Practitioners Association (CILPA) to regularly canvass lawyers on the level of business activity they are seeing in their daily work.
Cayman Finance CEO Steve McIntosh explains that the lifecycle of most financial products and services in Cayman begins with local legal advice and the registration of legal entities.
Assessing how much work lawyers are having and expect to see can therefore serve as a basic indicator of the health of the financial services industry in each individual sector.
“We have limited access to data that would give us a sense of the health of the industry. And what it really comes down to is how busy our members are,” McIntosh says.
Although the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority (CIMA) and General Registry regularly provide statistics, the data can be lagging and does not always reflect the full picture.
In the Fintech and virtual assets space, for instance, available CIMA statistics of Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) registrations represent only a fraction of the types of transactions and deals in the sector.
The business sentiment analysis, in turn, provides an image of the industry overall by asking 840 CILPA member lawyers:
- in which sectors they operate
- how busy they were comparatively in the past quarter
- how much of their work involved new business
- and their personal outlook for activity in the next quarter.
“The sentiment analysis is a simple and quick data point that is very useful at a high level,” McIntosh says. “At Cayman Finance, it will help guide promotional and product development activities. The results will enable our members to benchmark their own business volumes and outlook against the industry. And to government, the analysis indicates how the industry is doing and ultimately how this might impact government revenues.”
In addition to being an overall health check, the data is expected to become even more useful over time, as trend lines emerge which can be correlated with other data to determine the factors that are driving financial services business.
A snapshot of results of the first survey, conducted in July, showed a high level of activity in the virtual asset space and significant amounts of new business, combined with a positive outlook for the following quarter. By simply observing the CIMA’s statistics on VASPs, the conclusion would have been quite different, given that the number of registered VASPs has dropped from 21 in the third quarter of 2023 to 17 today.
Trust and private client lawyers reported equally positive demand for their services, including from new clients.
Legal practitioners active in banking and capital markets noted moderately favourable activity, albeit based on a lower volume of new business. The outlook for the third quarter, however, is more positive.
General corporate work, in contrast, has seen a slight slowdown, according to the survey and the immediate outlook also remains mixed.
Litigators, meanwhile, remain busy and expect to continue in the same vein in the immediate future, even if based mostly on legacy business.
Cayman Finance aims to grow the response rate to the survey by highlighting the value of the analysis to Cayman Finance members and sharing the results report exclusively with survey respondents. The next survey will be carried out immediately following the end of Q3.
If you are a CILPA member and did not receive the last survey in July, please contact enquiries@caymanfinance.ky.
