Financial Market Regulations
Championing the shifting regulatory landscape by designing winning strategies that ensure full compliance, while striving to enhance firms’ competitive offering.
Smart regulatory responses that ensure full compliance
The dynamic regulatory landscape requires banks, insurers and corporates providing financial services to stay ahead of the game by analysing the impact and defining the approach on the go. The primary objective is to implement a comprehensible and simple solution that ensures regulatory compliance. This behemoth of a task is often further complicated by outdated legacy IT systems, procedures and processes, that can jeopardize even the most straigthforward undertaking.
However, this necessary change driven by regulatory requirements can be seen as an opportunity. It helps firms create competitive advantages in product and client offerings while serving as the catalyst to streamline back-office, operations and trading systems. Seeing this change as an opportunity allows institutions to make a leap in modernising how they operate in terms of client service, process, governance and compliance.
We believe that a smart regulatory response should focus on:
- Ensuring that regulatory solutions are developed with an involvement of a wide range of stakeholders
- Harmonising processes, procedures and IT systems across jurisdictions to build streamlined approaches
- Leveraging regulatory changes to streamline business models and simplify offerings across various client groups
Focus areas of excellence
1
Strategy and execution
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Defining regulatory strategy for ensuring compliance and end-to-end implementation.
Challenge:
Implementing solutions that address regulations and their intent while defining a pragmatic approach that minimises complexity and long-term associated costs (i.e. added costs of running daily operations).
Solution:
Using client’s business requirements and IT architecture to design a regulatory strategy and front-to-back approach that ensures full compliance and strives to enhance and expand on firms’ competitive offering for clients.
What we offer
Content
Regulatory understanding
Leading understanding of the regulatory intent and industry consensus on a variety of regulatory topics.
Regulatory strategy
End-to-end blueprint of how regulations should be implemented, with various options based on business and IT circumstances.
Operating model execution
Processes (how things should be done in a business as usual mode) and governance (who should be in charge of which aspects of the regulation in daily business).
Process
Assessment
Establishing a regulatory baseline (understanding of the current situation).
Stakeholder management
Aligning internal and external business, and legal, regulatory projects and IT stakeholders, including alignments with industry participants.
Implementation (IT & Business)
Setting up business requirements documents for IT implementation and defining implementation road-maps; designing business processes and activities to uphold regulatory compliance in daily business.
Training
Training staff (business or centre of competence) to be able to support and deliver, as well as handle business processes / queries.
Success factors:
Business focus
Given our strong background in financial services, we analyse regulatory requirements without losing sight of business opportunities. This allows us to develop solutions that focus on generating competitive advantage for your end clients.
Proven approach
Running a proven method for regulatory projects, we focus on understanding regulatory intent and our client’s setup. This allows us to create both effective and sustainable solutions for your daily business.
Lean teams
Building tailored teams with experts who bring relevant experience to the project, allowing us to reduce unnecessary overhead.
Stakeholder management
Aiming to involve operational and senior business, legal, compliance and IT stakeholders across the board early in the design and decision-making process to ensure successful uptake.
Iterative approach with industry
Involving key industry stakeholders in the solution-design process is key to building pragmatic solutions while ensuring regulatory compliance.
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EU/FINSA Prospectus
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Tailoring institution-specific prospectus issuance process and program.
Challenge:
Offering financial instruments (specifically bonds) to a broad potential investor audience in the EU and Switzerland in light of varying international prospectus regimes and their implications for your institution and how you can offer products.
Solution:
Designing institution-specific issuance process and programme, so that they are tailored to our client’s capital market needs and meet the relevant regulatory requirements. We focus on developing the most suitable go-to-market approach for our client’s institution.
What we offer
Content
Target setup
Reviewing the issuance process along the value chain by looking at product manufacturing and distribution, related business lines, setup with treasuries and operations issuers.
Jurisdictional programmes
Determining requirements for your specific issuance programme to understand distribution-related requirements (e.g. EU vs FINSA regime).
Process
Support and programme management
Implementing pragmatic solutions using existing setups and technology, where applicable, and enhancing it using new tools and practical guidelines.
Leads to
Regulatory feedback
Coordinating with key industry participants (SVSP, ICMA) and leading external legal counsel to provide feedback and clarify unclear points with the regulator.
Leads to
Alignment with other regulations
Avoiding an isolated regulatory view by incorporating other relevant regulations (i.e. Target Market) into the review and repapering effort.
Success factors:
Holistic Stakeholder Approach
Partnering with leading industry representatives to develop the latest understanding of the regulatory requirements and provide the necessary outside-in perspective to engage in dialogue with regulators.
Process Simplification
Distilling the core of the regulatory agenda to design a highly-streamlined approach along the value chain of the issuance process to achieve tangible efficiency gains.
Governance and Ownership
Positioning prospectus topics within a financial services organisation and establishing good governance around it is crucial to taking advantage of opportunities as soon as they emerge.
Automation
For frequent issuers, the degree of automation is key to efficiency. We review the status quo, identify optimisation potential, define the target state and identify the right automation partner for your infrastructure.
Our expertise covers a variety of regulatory fields:
- Investor protection (e.g. MiFID, FINSA, EU Prospectus Regulation)
- Anti-money laundering
- Sustainable finance (i.e. ESG)
- Transition regulations (i.e. LIMES)
- Data governance (e.g. GDPR)
- Tax (e.g. FATCA)