Paris, Île-de-France, France
It was in the context of the 2008 global financial crisis that I took charge of and developed the Financial Regulations (FinReg) practice of the firm in Paris. This is with the desire, as a compass, to make it a relevant instrument in the process of strategic decision-making for companies in the financial sector, by combining the traditional activities of regulatory advice, litigation, transactional and crisis management. This was a huge challenge to become partner in an international law firm when the global economy was crashing down! But the timing turned out to be excellent in retrospect. And precisely, the successive crises over the past decade (e.g. the collapse of Lehman Brothers, then of MF Global, the Eurozone crisis and the restructuring of the Greek sovereign debt (PSI, PSI+), the Madoff scandal, the rescue followed by the resolution of the Crédit Immobilier de France (CIF), the resolution of Banco Espirito Santo (BES) and finally, more recently, Brexit (and even Frexit, which thank god did not take place!) or the Covid-19 crisis…) have strengthened my belief and proved me right. To meet the challenges my clients face, my practice aims to be comprehensive, agile and scalable, in that it covers, in a transversal logic, all sectoral regulations governing payment, electronic money and investment banking services, asset management, market and post-market infrastructures, insurance and reinsurance, etc., because very frequently the issues cut across these regulatory silos (not to mention that the regulations increasingly borrow from each other: the Solvency II directive which inspired by Basel II; the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) inspired by MiF2, etc.). This has become all the more relevant in the context of the fast delopping fintech and crypto industries which cut across all such regulatory silos and raise a number of legal characterisation questions. These issues are also often multinational. The international dimension is also deeply rooted in the DNA of my practice; my team thus works continuously in close coordination with those of our offices belonging to our international network (Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hong Kong/Singapore, London, Madrid, Milan, New York/Washington, etc., to name a few).
▶ President of the working group dedicated to the reform of IOBSP (ongoing) ▶ President of the working group dedicated to the implementation of AIFMD2 ▶ President of the working group dedicated to the review of DSP2 (PSD3/PSR) ▶ President of the working group dedicated to Cloud computing in the banking sector (DORA) ▶ President of the working group dedicated to the proposal for a EU Regulation on the law applicable to the third-party effects of assignments of claims (confidential report, not subject to public release) ▶ Member of working groups dedicated to MiCA, Brexit, banking secrecy, Cyber-risk insurability, extraterritoriality of the European Union legislation, the reform of tokenised securities, digital securities ("securities tokens"), the French 2002 ISDA Master Agreement, etc.
Specialised in: ▶ funded and synthetic securitisations in respect of various asset classes (trade receivables, CMBS, consumer loans, CLOs/CDOs) and in the creation of ABCP conduits (Altitude, Amedis, Thesee, etc.) ▶ derivatives, notably credit derivatives and securitisation swaps ▶ municipal bonds (commercial paper note programmes (notably the very first: Ile de France tap issue programme), monoline enhanced bonds (Région Champagne-Ardennes, Ville de Marseille, etc.)