A major European wholesale and investment bank with global reach asked for help meeting customer classification requirements.
The firm operated in all the major global financial markets and was therefore required to classify customer sophistication according to each local classification regime. Equivalence between regimes was difficult to establish making it necessary to classify customers multiple times if they did business with the bank in multiple locations. The firm also had many cross-border trading activities with U.S. customers which required adherence to the U.S. 15A6 reporting requirements.
Lysis worked with global and local compliance to define equivalence between the different classification regimes including EU MiFID classification, US II and MII classification, Singapore, Hong Kong and other far eastern regimes. Lysis created a classification and equivalence model and implemented this on global on-boarding and customer management systems. This was then used to control the distribution of research to customers and the trading investment activities they could under-take. Furthermore, 15A6 reporting was also enforced for in-scope trades with U.S. customers.