As agreed following our recent meeting, I am forwarding this e-mail for your consideration and response in respect to the Compliance / Control related setup for Structured Finance going forward in order to consider this in the context of the office floor plans for our new offices, which are currently being finalized.
As briefly discussed the Structured Finance business is run as a separate team to the general corporate coverage teams within CBG, while we provide structured financing solutions to corporate clients across CBG.
As such we have to consider any potential compliance and control room related issues in the way we run our business both now, but particularly going forward as we are working to further enhance and develop the business going forward.
In some of the financing transactions we are involved in, we may receive confidential information and in some cases information which is of a price-sensitive nature. In such cases, we will need to ensure that the information is retained in a secured and confidential manner both physically and electronically and that records are kept on an ongoing basis, of who has access to such information (‘deal team insiders’). I have set out below examples of such transactions :
a) Information related to transactions involving listed companies, where such information is of a price sensitive nature, for example an acquisition or a large contract which could impact the share price of the company once announced to the market (i.e. could be used to gain insider trading advantage)
b) Information related to transaction where a bidding process is involved, for example for a contract or a company acquisition, where knowledge of this information should be leaked – deliberately or otherwise to competing bidders or the market resulting in a potential economic loss to our client
c) Information related to order situations where the information is provided by the client to ARB on a strictly confidential basis, as the leaking of such information could lead to ARB being held liable for potentially losses incurred by our client as a result of the breach of the confidentiality
Information received in cases like the above would normally be subject to ARB (CBG, Structured Finance) signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) prior to receiving the information under which ARB commits to keeping the information confidential and limit access to the information to deal insiders only on a need to know basis.
We have in light of the above, flagged that it should be considered whether the structured finance business (team) should be separated from the wider CBG business in the new office floor planning, as this is otherwise generally based on an open floor office architecture and may make it difficult to maintain basic Compliance/Control room standards for the handling of the types of transactions set out above. As an alternative an area with separate access control (glass walls or similar) would allow for a physical segregation of deal team insiders and access to information captured by such restrictions.
I would appreciate your feedback from a Compliance perspective in respect to the above as soon as possible, in order to consider this in connection with the finalization of the office floor plans for CBG, as the current default plans are based on Structured Finance being part of the general open floor architecture.