Could you explain what BRP is and what it does?
BRP Bizzozero & Partners SA is a Swiss group with a presence in Geneva and Zurich, as well as London, Luxembourg and Singapore. It is a world-leading specialist in cross-border regulatory and compliance products. BRP is at the cutting-edge of financial services regulatory risk management and cross-border risks. The quality of our products and related advice, as well as our responsiveness, are some of the reasons that have led a large number of financial institutions to choose us as a trusted and innovative solutions provider.
What is your raison d’être?
BRP aims to provide financial institutions such as banks and asset managers with the necessary skills, knowledge and know-how when dealing with cross-border issues, from daily routine questions to more complex regulatory risk analysis. No financial institution operating at an international level can nowadays deal with the ever-changing regulatory environment without a proper cross-border policy; our products and services offer a comprehensive and pragmatic solution to such challenges. The surge in regulatory activity over the past few years has led to a greatly increased volume of rules that are extremely complex and constantly evolving, that vary from one jurisdiction to another, and that must be understood and complied with both in the country where the intermediary and client are based.
What is your client base?
The BRP group is proud to include amongst our worldwide clientele more than 250 banks and banking groups and over 500 independent financial advisers, asset managers and fund management companies.
What are the key factors in BRP’s success?
Our success is the result of the high standards of expertise we have provided since 2010. This has been made possible by the professionalism and wide-ranging experience of BRP staff.
Our expertise is focused on the regulatory world and its ever-growing challenges. We never compromise our expertise with commercial considerations. Our products and services reflect this ethical state of mind. We offer an individualised approach, based on our comprehension of a client’s needs and expectations when it comes to the risk management of their cross-border activities. This two-sided approach provides straight answers to allow our clients to be time-efficient while offering dedicated bespoke services to suit less generic needs.
When preparing our products, we have access to an international network of over 500 experts in the regulatory and financial fields.
What is your approach to cross-border issues?
We like to analyse an issue and the various barriers to cross-border activity. Depending on the concerned country, there are different rules to take into consideration, most often commercial law, financial services regulation, investor and consumer protection rules, regulation governing foreign exchange controls, tax laws, AML and data protection.
What do your products cover?
For ease of use and to address key risks, our products are grouped into four ‘pillars’ that need to be considered when engaging in cross-border activity.
- Country Manuals Services – Local licensing requirements for cross-border financial services (including prospecting, negotiation and reporting) provided by financial institutions
- Country Manuals Products – Registration and documentation requirements (including marketing material) for the distribution of financial products such as equities, bonds, structured products, funds etc.
- Country Manuals Suitability – Aspects to be considered for a suitable and appropriate allocation of financial products to clients according to local regulation
- Tax Investment Manuals -information about fiscal consequences of specific investments for end clients (content provided by BRP Tax, an affiliated company of BRP Bizzozero & Partners)
We are leaders in cross-border regulatory risk and our banking material covers more than 150 countries. We recognise differences in regulatory treatment, so for example, we have separate families of manual for non-EU banks targeting EU countries as compared to EU banks targeting EU countries.
BRP’s country manuals are available online via our platform and subscription includes:
- Regular updates
- Alerts
- Hotline for comprehension questions
- Access to Country Manuals and the BRP address book of local lawyers
What about the use of technology?
Technology is key and we have developed the BRP Platform for our products.
This Platform aims to:
- Provide an accessible IT base for our products, including Alerts
- Improve efficiency
- Provide a reliable Q&A function
- Provide simple on-screen and downloadable access to a document
- Allow remote access for banks staff such as relationship managers
Access is free based on current contractual agreements.
Using the Platform, clients may, for example:
- Run a search to look for relevant documents
- Get a global view of available and relevant documents through search
BRP also owns 50% of Indigita, a RegTech company specialised in developing technological solutions to meet cross-border regulatory challenges. Indigita benefits from BRP’s regulatory expertise. With Indigita, we are digitising our material so that answers to complex situations can be provided readily and BRP content can be integrated into a bank’s core systems.
Do you offer other services apart from Country Manuals?
Yes, we offer advice and our regulatory advice is also an asset that is much appreciated by our clients. They can rely on our ability to offer pragmatic.
We also offer training on a wide range of cross-border matters. Training is customised, interactive and designed to offer readily understandable solutions. The courses are based on real-life cases to allow our clients to understand the practical aspects of cross-border regulatory issues.
What are your current hot topics?
We are closely monitoring developments in the EU especially with respect to the new third country regime under MiFID II and MiFIR. Brexit will have a significant impact on the EU authorities approach as to what is going to be permitted in terms services out of a third country. The MiFID 2/MiFIR regime was never intended to cover a large financial services player such as the UK becoming a third country. This is why we are actively assisting our clients in defining their strategy during this period.
What are your plans for the future?
We are broadening our offer and starting from 2019 will cover other sectors like Retail Banking and Asset Management through dedicated Country Manuals.