Clifford Chance and Neota Logic have developed an automated client toolkit to help financial institutions assess and address the impact of MiFID II, which comes into force in January 2018 and is one of the most complex and wide-ranging pieces of legislation to come out of the European Union since the financial crisis of 2008.
Using Neota Logic’s sophisticated decision tree software, the Clifford Chance application allows firms to filter thousands of pages of regulation and legislation by their business type, clients and products, streamlining the review process and providing draft clauses for adoption in their documentation.
The toolkit is being offered to Clifford Chance clients for a fixed up-front fee, allowing them to access complex legal advice at a fraction of the price of individual analysis.
“Given the vast scale of these reforms, a full analysis of the new regulations would be a serious undertaking, and a costly exercise for any financial institution” said Monica Sah, Financial Regulatory partner at Clifford Chance. “By embracing artificial intelligence, we’ve managed to develop a tool that gives our clients just what they need, right when they need it, at a much reduced cost.
“Whether firms are at the beginning of their MiFID journey, or need a way of benchmarking their existing provisions, we’re confident that this tool will provide real value to a range of our clients, from global investment banks to boutique asset managers.”
The MiFID II toolkit is the second application that Clifford Chance has developed with Neota, following on from an over-the-counter derivatives documentation tool in 2016.
Sah added: “Handing over reams of technical information is blunt and outdated. By working with technology providers like Neota, we are able to package our advice into powerful products that save time, money, and enable our clients to deploy that information in a smart way throughout their organisation.
“It also opens up our advice to a wider range of potential clients who might otherwise be priced out by the fees for one off, bespoke analysis.”