‘Brilliant – a beautiful, friendly, welcoming environment,’ beams Canadian Douglas Melville, who previously ran the ombudsman service in Toronto. ‘For folk interested in the outdoors, it’s an absolutely fabulous opportunity for family activities, right on your doorstep.’
Mr Melville (52) has been in the job since 1 June, setting up a new service dealing with complaints about money matters in both Jersey and Guernsey.
Since then, the family have moved across – he and his wife, Gailina Liew, have a son (18) and three daughters (16, 15 and 14) – and with school starting this week, the ‘glorious summer’ is over. ‘Getting people up and through breakfast on time has a tendency to focus the mind,’ he said. ‘That’s when life really settles.’
Currently he and operations manager Sophie Watkins are occupying a self-contained office suite above the Digital Jersey hub in Grenville Street, but they’re about to advertise for a couple of extra recruits to deal with dissatisfied customers, with possible complaints ranging from inappropriate investment advice to mis-selling of insurance.
Their first task has been to set up a website inviting members of the public to contact them prior to the formal opening of the service in November. ‘We don’t have a very clear picture about the volume, and we don’t want to overdo it,’ said the ombudsman, explaining that in an ideal world customers should be able to sort out difficulties with banks and investment firms without the need for independent legal advice. ‘The objective is to put me out of business.’
So why take a job in Jersey, and why now? ‘I probably knew what I was getting into professionally, but what’s different here is the unique environment of the Channel Islands, in two jurisdictions, with a broader range of services and the international nature of the clientèle.
‘This is also the five years before the children all head off to university, so it’s also about giving them different experiences, an adventure to share as a family.’
Adventures certainly feature highly in Mr Melville’s own CV. Brought up in French-speaking Quebec, his first job was for the Canadian international development agency in the 1980s. ‘In Canada, we had the Student Commonwealth Conference, a programme of the Royal Commonwealth Society out of London. That was a wonderful introduction for me into international policy and international relations.
‘The break came when there was a huge increase in the effort around the African famine crisis. There was a need for information and co-ordination and I was able to get out in the field and do some very interesting work, as a young single person.’ The work took him to over ten countries throughout Africa and the Middle East, and also paid his way through graduate and law school, where he met his wife, who is Chinese by family background but brought up in Toronto.
So why change to the financial services sector? ‘The lifestyle doesn’t work with a partner,’ he said. ‘Some of the environments are not safe and I’ve seen things that young people don’t generally see and are not experiences that you would put a family into by choice. I did have a choice.
‘I’d trained as a lawyer, but I was not attracted by the degree of specialisation then required of young lawyers. But I had learned Spanish at university, there was a Canadian bank that was at the time active in Latin America, and I got hired into that subdivision. I really enjoyed the complexity, the variety, and the integrity of doing it right was always a comfortable place for me.’
In 1996, then in a senior policy role at the Canadian Bankers’ Association, he was asked to create a new financial ombudsman service for Canada. ‘It was my project, so I got to build it. I was the first secretary to the board of directors, then went back into the industry for a bunch more years with the bank and the credit union system.
‘Then the second ombudsman hired me as his deputy, and I fell in love with the work. It’s a side of the law you enjoy studying in law school, but never get to do as a practitioner unless you’re in government service.’
When the second ombudsman moved on three years later, he had the chance ‘to show the board what I might do with it’, and has been in post there for the past six years.
‘It’s been a turbulent time, the financial crisis, and in the aftermath our volumes tripled. Operationally the stress was extreme and the scale had grown to roughly 50 staff.’
Not least was the problem that the Canadian ombudsman’s word was not binding, with several firms refusing to pay out compensation. ‘That is a difference between Jersey and Canada,’ he said. ‘At the end of the day, what’s expected of us is to make a call and that’s the end of the process. If the client accepts it, it is binding on the firm.
‘But really, what this office is about is moving away from legal right and obligation to getting the right outcome from a fairness standpoint. It’s not about control, it’s about restorative justice – what’s the right experience that the customer should have had from their financial services adviser, and putting them back in that situation as if it had not occurred.’
Giving people access to justice is also important, he explained. ‘The average amount in dispute in banking and investment complaints are relatively modest, certainly not high enough to warrant the costs of litigation. The courts are busy, and there is an inherent built-in cost, so there’s got to be a fair bit at stake. So this is about creating accessibility to people here and beyond these shores who have had their services provided from the Channel Islands.’
Since moving into financial services, he has continued as a volunteer in humanitarian work and following the 2004 tsunami conducted an assessment in Sri Lanka. ‘Canada has a huge historic link to Sri Lanka and it was heartbreaking to see the scale of the devastation. I had seen difficult things in Africa, but that was different. Famine is often environmental, exacerbated by politics, but this was pure nature and the power of nature.’
He is somewhat surprised that already he may have found a new outlet for his volunteer work here in the Island. ‘I saw a small advert in the newspaper looking for a commissioner for the Jersey Overseas Aid Commission and it was so aligned to what I used to do. I thought they wouldn’t want someone fresh off the plane, but they told me they were going to take it forward.
‘I’m very excited by the opportunity – for me, it gives me insight into how things work here in Jersey, but allows me to bring what I’ve spent all these years doing and to try and add value in my new home country.’
With the family also finding that the Island offers musical opportunities — Gailina Liew is an accomplished pianist and singer and the three girls are already enrolled in a local choir – as well as watersports and close proximity to Europe, Mr Melville feels he is in the right place at the right time.
‘We’ve just come back for our first European road trip, typical Canadian fashion – we packed the van and drove for nine days, to Milan and back. Absolutely fabulous trip.
‘It’s all right there. And we intend to use it, get involved locally, and make it home.’
