The Financial Institutions Industry Group (FIIG) is one of the strategic priority areas of our 2020 strategy and the statistics are compelling: during 2016, around 80% of our legal staff worked on a matter for a FI client, with 1,600 lawyers recording more than 50 hours for our FI clients worldwide.

White & Case has been working with financial institution clients since the Firm’s inception. It’s an area in which we are truly world-renowned in some key practices, including Capital Markets, Bank Finance, EIPAF, Litigation and Investigations, and in our work with the banks as financial advisors on key M&A transactions.

Spotlight on our FIIG work

A large proportion of our work representing FI clients is on transactional matters where the legal costs are ultimately passed on to a borrower or issuer client rather than paid by the FI itself.

This ‘product’ work (where we support the client in doing their ordinary business) is generally called ‘third-party pay’ or ‘pass-through’ work and, in most instances, isn’t covered by the panel agreements we have in place with our FI clients.

So we are looking to build on this important flow of business to do more work for the financial institutions themselves, on strategic, advisory and enforcement/investigation matters – something we call ‘bank-pay’ or ‘own account’ work.

Fresh approach

JOHN REYNOLDS
PARTNER

Partner John Reynolds explains: “When we launched the global FI industry group we were very careful to consider how to complement the existing business development efforts around the FI clients being organised by product teams/third-party pay practices, and regional sections such as Banking, Capital Markets and EIPAF.

“Where we have added value is by ensuring, through the global and regional FI client teams we have established, that cross-selling opportunities are much more easily identified and then acted upon.

“We are now focused on leveraging the relationships we’ve established to source new and increased opportunities to introduce other practices, such as Investigations, Regulatory, Cyber Security, M&A, and Litigation. Our vision is for the Firm to have a strong group of multi-practice, multi-office FI global clients.”

Changing perceptions

The FIIG global strategy is focused on three key objectives: maintaining the current revenue streams mentioned above; bringing more rigorous client account management to the FI target clients; and leveraging the Firm’s multiple FI client panels to increase our market share in high value and strategic bank-pay work.

PATRICK SARCH
PARTNER

Partner Patrick Sarch explains: “We want to move the dial and change how we’re perceived by our clients, who are sometimes unaware of the breadth and depth of our expertise and the relationships we have with their businesses.

“We also aim to raise awareness of the value we can bring to working with them on their most important matters/mandates.”

Our goal is to build strong, high-revenue relationships where we become trusted advisors to our financial institution clients.

“For instance, we work for Standard Chartered Bank (SCB) across four continents, but the client didn’t have us on their radar as a global firm,” explains Patrick.

“The SCB Priority Client Team has come together and worked hard in recent months to change that perception and, as a result, we are now bidding to be on their global roster.

“If successful, we will look to support them on strategically important matters, with a view to becoming one of their first ports of calls on these issues.

“That is where we can add more value and build close, long-term relationships as core, trusted advisors. There are real synergy benefits to be gained from this, including broadening, deepening and ultimately institutionalizing our existing strong relationships.

“It’s about acknowledging that we are a truly global leading law firm and letting our existing and target clients know about it.”

Focus on key and priority clients

GERNOT WAGNER
PARTNER

There are seven FI clients in the Key Client Program with a further 23 FIIG Priority Clients identified at either global or regional level. One key objective is to increase our number of US$10million-a-year revenue FI clients to 10-15 by 2020.

Partner Gernot Wagner says: “In the past, the sheer number of financial institutions we had on our books made it difficult for us to focus as much as we should on our top clients, but our strategy aims to address that.

“We are seeing good growth with our FI clients in the Key Client Program and, in late 2016, we extended this to bring in a targeted group of FI Priority Clients. We’ve also established regional Priority Client teams to increase our focus on them.

“We want to zero in on the big clients that match our offering and build revenue with them.”

Strengthening ties, building relationships

Jeremy Ford, Business Development Director for the FIIG, says: “As we’ve explained, a large proportion of our current FIIG work is third-party pay work, but we want to start increasing the amount of bank-pay work (where the bank pays the bill), because this is where we can really build strong customer relationships and position ourselves for the highest value work.

“This is also the work that the majority of our FI client panels cover, so we are pushing against an open door to some extent. This doesn’t diminish the value we place on third-party pay business, but what we do want to do is to cross-sell more effectively and look to increase our overall share of wallet from our major FI clients.”

To better illustrate the range of services we offer, the Group has defined these into three categories as part of our 2020 vision: Trusted Counsel, Trusted Advisor and Trusted Defender.

“It is an exciting time for the FIIG, as the Firm has also been investing heavily in partner recruitment and promotions across these three categories in recent years,” says Jeremy.

“For instance, in the Trusted Advisor category we have seen partners with good FI credentials join in our M&A, Regulatory, Real Estate, Financial Technology (FinTech), Litigation, Investigations, Cyber Security and Data Protection practices, which gives us real credibility in our focus on dislodging our FI clients’ incumbent advisers in these areas.”

How FIIG can help you

The Financial Institution Industry Group aims to give support when it comes to strengthening our relationship management through both proactive client teams and contribution to practice group business development efforts.

Another element of the FIIG team’s role is to identify products either in one practice or across several practices which have the potential to be focused on specific FI issues.

The group is producing FIIG Quick Cards on these to explain why clients will be interested, the key issues and key information to help create interest with clients and aid in cross-selling.

Good examples include Green Finance and a recent piece on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), which has yielded several opportunities and pieces of work. Several more are in development and will be shared soon and available on the FIIG Connect page.

Alongside aiding cross-selling and coordination, FIIG seeks to help our lawyers better understand the issues and opportunities our FI clients are faced with in the current global/macro environment, so that we proactively deliver an even higher level of advice.

We aim to free people up to do what they do best – providing expert legal advice and client service – while growing a culture where we think more about where we might help our clients in other areas. Contact the FIIG team on FIIG@whitecase.com to get involved!