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

NEW YORK, May 11, 2022 — 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. 

About Factor

‍Factor is the leader in solutions for complex legal work at scale, ranging from deadline-driven regulatory projects to long-term managed services. Factor combines expert legal resourcing and market know-how of Traditional Law, with the process efficiency, smart legal technology, and data-driven project management of New Law to bridge a huge gap in the market. The company is comprised of more than 600 lawyers, legal specialists, technologists, and process consultants with offices in New York, Chicago, London, Belfast, and Poland. Factor is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. For more information, go to https://www.factor.law or LinkedIn 

About Mayer Brown 

Mayer Brown's award-winning derivatives team is one of the only firms with a leading derivatives practice in London, New York and Germany. 

The Mayer Brown team won derivatives Global Law Firm of the Year at the 2019 Global Capital Derivatives Awards, as well as European Law Firm of the Year in 2021 and each of the five years prior to 2021, and US Law Firm of the Year for four consecutive years. 

About Acadia

‍Acadia is the leading industry provider of integrated risk management services for the derivatives community. Our risk, margin and collateral tools enable a holistic risk management strategy on a real-time basis within a centralized industry standard platform. 

Acadia’s comprehensive suite of analytics solutions and services helps firms manage risk better, smarter, and faster, while optimizing resources across the entire trade life cycle. Through an open-access model, Acadia brings together a network of banks and other derivatives participants, along with several market infrastructures and innovative vendors. 

Backed by 16 major industry participants and market infrastructures, Acadia is used by a community of over 2000 firms exchanging more than $1 trillion of collateral on daily basis via its margin automation services. Acadia is headquartered in Norwell, MA and has offices in Boston, Dublin, Dusseldorf, London, Manila, New York, and Tokyo. Acadia® is a registered trademark of AcadiaSoft, Inc. For more information, visit acadia.inc. Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn 

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