In this article, Richard Calnan discusses the purpose and scope of the Secured Transactions Code.
18 March 2024This article addresses the legal and practical issues for lenders on leveraged buy-outs in relation to taking security over warranty and indemnity insurance policies.
18 March 2024Artificial intelligence (AI) typically “learns” through data points that are fed into its system. Firms using AI-powered tools in the provision of financial services will need to navigate the risks of using such technology, including ensuring there is data integrity to mitigate against the risk of embedded biases within the system’s decision-making process. Transparency and explainability are key to ensuring the decision-making processes of the AI technology can be clearly articulated to clients and regulators. This article considers the regulatory implications of relying on AI in financial services by considering the example of investment advice or portfolio management.
18 March 2024In this article Sarah Garvey seeks to assess the potential opportunities and risks for finance parties on the UK’s accession to Hague 2019 and whether finance parties are likely to adapt their approach to drafting dispute resolution clauses as a result. The article also provides a high-level overview of key features of Hague 2019 and highlights areas for future dispute and debate.
18 March 2024On 20 September 2023 the Electronic Trade Documents Act (ETDA) came into force. Formerly, in English law, document possession usually required physical possession. Now, the ETDA allows for “electronic trade documents” to be treated as equivalent to traditional “paper trade documents”, if they meet certain “gateway” criteria underpinned by a “reliable system”. In this article, we consider how the English courts are likely to approach interpretating this reliability requirement. Would any flaw in the system, no matter how short-lived and abnormal, render it unreliable? Or would a more detailed systemic analysis be needed? If so, what would that look like?
18 March 2024It is almost 15 years since the EU’s risk retention (skin-in-the-game) rules were developed in response to concerns that interests of investors in securitisations and their originators were insufficiently aligned. In that time, the market has developed a number of solutions to adhere to the rules in situations where there may no longer be a substantial entity that was involved in the creation of the underlying exposures to perform the risk retention function.
18 March 2024In this article, the authors consider recent federal court decisions that have addressed how two evolving financial products and markets – namely syndicated loans and crypto tokens – should be classified in the US regulatory system. They then highlight the need for policy-oriented reforms to address the current uncertainty.
18 March 2024The duty in Quincecare can prove a difficult principle to apply in practice. In the current age of cryptocurrency fraud and the open question of the scope of an exchange’s liability, is now an appropriate time to extend duties found in banking law to the activities of an exchange, or is that taking matters too far?
18 March 2024The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is not evidence of the failure of Basel III since certain capital and liquidity requirements were disapplied in respect of SVB under US law. Regulators should reconsider which banks are “non-systemic” and which deposits are “stable” in the age of social media and mobile banking and supervisory practices should be scrutinised. In the UK, the SVB collapse comes at a time at which the UK Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) is looking at the reform of certain prudential requirements for small banks under its proposals for a “strong and simple framework”. The lessons from SVB may lead to a change in the PRA’s approach. This article focusses on UK banking regulation and supervision and considers potential capital and liquidity reforms in the aftermath of the failure of SVB and its UK arm, SVB UK Limited (SVB UK).
18 March 2024Where mistakes occur in security documents, practitioners usually have to assess whether they should be rectified by the court, or whether rectification by the parties alone is sufficient (eg in a Deed of Rectification (DoR)). This can create particular headaches if the mistake is spotted after registration; and the consequences may also depend on the nature of the mistake. For example, if the DoR arguably creates a new security (such as by correcting a mistake in the definition of the liabilities secured), this may cause problems where the simple correction of addresses or other typographical errors might not. This article considers the law relating to rectification of such documents, and some of the practical implications of dealing with rectification whether through the courts or simply between the parties to the security.
18 March 2024