FINANCIAL SERVICES: DRAFTING PRIVATE CLIENT AGREEMENTS

Investment businesses and their advisers, have gone through the trauma of the new settlement in financial services regulation and emerged into a brave new dawn of what is supposedly less burdensome regulation. The major regulatory challenge on the horizon is adjusting to life under yet another new regulator and securing compliance with yet another new set of standards once the Personal Investments Authority (PIA) has overcome its well publicised teething difficulties. However, investment businesses need to keep their compliance arrangements and the legal structure of their client relationships under regular review. This paper raises some issues to be borne in mind when drafting client agreements, in particular the written two‐way customer agreements that the Securities and Investment Board (SIB) Core Conduct of Business Rules require in the case of private discretionary management clients (SIB Core Conduct of Business Rules (CCBR) 14.2).