Financial services

We have the legal skills, technical knowledge and industry insight to advise on own account and advisory mandates, in addition to your underlying products and services. We are at the forefront of advising financial institutions on the impact that fintech and the broader digitisation of financial services is having across the sector.

We offer the full range of legal services required by wealth managers, such as:

• corporate advice, including mergers and acquisitions, joint-ventures, corporate structuring, outsourcings and capital raising;
• funds advice, including the establishment, regulation, operation and restructuring of investment funds; and
• regulatory advice on the issues affecting wealth managers, including obtaining authorisations and regulatory approvals for establishing foreign subsidiaries and branches, conduct of business requirements and prudential regulatory issues.

We also advise on all kinds of dispute resolution, labour law, antitrust and data protection issues.

Market leaders in identifying risks

The wealth and asset management sector continues to attract political and regulatory attention. In this environment, our long-term experience and deep knowledge of the sectors count – not just in dealing with the regulatory technicalities – but also their interplay with the broader commercial context in which you operate.

With a thorough understanding of the legal and regulatory framework, we proactively engage with regulators to identify, and help our clients with, the impact of legal and regulatory change at national and international levels.

Applied wealth management sector knowledge

Our work covers the full range of issues that firms encounter whether on a day-to-day basis, as a result of firm-specific initiatives or as a result of industry-wide change. As well as advising on the legal and regulatory regime for asset management and distribution activities (for example, MiFID II, the EU CMU and SMCR), we also have extensive experience of drafting and negotiating the various commercial agreements that are common in the sector (such as IMAs, distribution agreements and joint-ventures, investment platform agreements, service agreements, broker terms and ISDAs). Clients particularly like to involve us on non-standard documentation or where the agreement is part of a major strategic initiative.

We are also regularly involved in restructuring and rationalising investment management groups and operations domestically and internationally, most recently in the context of Brexit.

Our global financial services regulatory team

We have a dedicated wealth and asset management legal and regulatory practice, and the core of that is based in our highly regarded financial services regulatory group.

Sitting within our wider regulatory team, our wealth management team benefits from cross-sectoral perspectives and expertise. We have managed some of the market’s most critical, sizeable financial services projects and transactions (domestic and cross-border) and guide our clients on regulatory and legislative changes shaping the global financial services sector.

We have proactive and close relationships with the major regulators and associations around the world, and in turn help our clients to foster similarly constructive relationships and stay on top of the latest legal and regulatory developments. Experience consistently confirms that this makes an important difference in an environment as competitive as the asset management sector.