Factor, Mayer Brown, and Acadia launch new tech-enabled service to simplify derivatives compliance

Global News

12
May
2022

Editor

Factor, the leader in solutions for complex legal work at scale, today announces the global launch of ‘CAN Comply’ together with Mayer Brown, a leading global law firm with a renowned derivatives practice, and Acadia, the leading provider of integrated risk management services for the derivatives community.

CAN Comply simplifies ongoing EMIR compliance requiring the review of collateral and netting arrangements. The three organizations have collaborated to create a flat-fee service for the review and certification of compliance of these arrangements. 

Mayer Brown, Factor and Acadia bring their respective strengths in expert advisory, complex legal work at scale, and scalable agreement technology together to create a service for clients that is cost-effective, secure, and compliant. For in-scope market participants, complying with the ongoing requirements of EMIR can be costly and time consuming. And with each wave of initial margin enforcement, increasing numbers of institutions with smaller in-house teams have come into scope and must comply. To date, this work has typically been absorbed by a combination of outside counsel and existing in-house departments resulting in increased costs and additions to existing workloads.

“Regulations contribute to the growing avalanche of workloads facing in-house departments. By integrating our respective strengths, we’ve created a client-centric service that enables robust compliance without excess burden or cost,” said Chris DeConti, Factor’s Head of Strategy. 

Clients simply identify the counterparty relationships they would like analysed and all relevant information is shared via the secure digital Acadia Agreement Manager platform. Factor and Mayer Brown analyze the data provided, perform cross-validation checks, and provide a certificate that the client can present demonstrating compliance, with ongoing annual checks to confirm continued compliance available too.

“Clients have been so focussed on the implementation aspect of initial margin, it would be easy to overlook some of EMIR's ongoing obligations,” said Edmund Parker, Partner and Global Head of Derivatives at Mayer Brown. “With a simple, minimum fuss, data extraction model, our combined offering elegantly solves this problem.” 

“This collaboration adds a valuable application for clients using Agreement Manager, enabling them to leverage their centralized agreement data and ease of access to reduce costs and streamline compliance,” said Richard Barton, Head of Product Management at Acadia.