From Legal Futures’ Associate Seal Software
Seal Software announced that it has released the Seal Financial Services Suite, the most comprehensive extraction and analytics platform for contractual data held by banks and financial services firms. The specialized platform utilizes artificial intelligence to provide the most advanced toolset for gaining insight from unstructured contractual data so commercial, investment and global banks, and financial institutions can make better, proactive and faster business decisions.
“The financial services sector is subject to more unique and stringent regulatory and reporting requirements than any other industry,” said Ulf Zetterberg, CEO and co-founder at Seal Software. “The Seal Financial Services Suite is a direct reflection of our deep industry expertise and nearly a decade of using artificial intelligence to deliver the detailed information that our financial services clients require across their contract portfolios.”
Since 2008, the financial services community has confronted a rapidly evolving landscape that requires enhanced record keeping and reporting requirements across all critical contractual relationships. Seal Software’s solutions have been developed to directly respond to these rapidly changing requirements, ranging from resolution planning and ringfencing, to third-party vendor risk (OCC 2013-29 and comparable statutes globally), to QFC recordkeeping and reporting for ISDA and similar transactions. In addition to using Seal to support regulatory reporting, increasingly financial services clients are using Seal to facilitate their analysis of contractual data for competitive purposes, including reducing the time to transact with new customers, partners and suppliers.
The Seal Financial Services Suite consists of multiple collections of pre-built analytics for targeted common use cases. Seal refers to these purpose-built collections of analytics as accelerators. Accelerators available as part of the Seal Financial Services Suite include:
- Procurement Insight™ – Detailed procurement-related analytics regarding contract compliance and third-party risk (OCC 2013-29 and similar)
- LIBOR Insight™ – Detailed analytics to identify the existence and use of LIBOR and LIBOR-related interest calculations in credit and trading relationships
- QFC Insight™ – Detailed analytics to support SR-14 compliance for qualified financial documents such as ISDA master agreements
- Brexit Insight™ – Detailed analytics to identify and surface key clauses for determining Brexit readiness, exposure and need for renegotiation or re-papering
- GDPR Data Privacy Insight™ – Detailed analytics to identify GDPR compliance and readiness within contracts such as data breach notifications and access rights
- NDA Insight™ – Detailed analytics to identify key clauses and risks in strategic non-disclosure agreements
- M&A Insight™ – Detailed analytics to surface key terms for due diligence, divestiture and post-merger integration projects
Most recently, Seal’s customers and consulting partners have turned to the Seal platform as a go-to solution for the automated analysis of contract portfolios for LIBOR and IBOR exposure. The LIBOR standard is the most common benchmark interest rate globally and will be retired by 2021. Industry experts estimate that nearly US $350 trillion of debt could require restructuring, including the possible re-documentation of in excess of 100 million financial contracts. Seal’s proprietary LIBOR Insight Accelerator uses artificial intelligence and training by leading industry experts to rapidly triage contract portfolios for core LIBOR issues, including representative topics such as form of LIBOR/IBOR, currency, governing law, and fallback provisions.
Seal’s financial services practice is led by two industry experts, each with more than a decade of experience as senior lawyers serving the financial services community. Stuart Brock is a director at Seal Software where he helps lead Seal’s financial services programs. Stuart is a licensed attorney who practiced law at a top national firm for a decade before moving in-house at Bank of America where he held various roles within the legal, compliance, and procurement organizations. Lynn Sumlin, also a director at Seal, practiced law for more than 20 years and was a partner in the banking practice of an international law firm where she concentrated her career on serving the financial services industry, including managing regulatory, commercial financial, securities, and corporate transactions.
“Banks spend some $270 billion each year on compliance,” said Stuart Brock. “Traditional risk assessments are conducted by large teams of people manually scouring tens of thousands, and often hundreds of thousands, of business agreements. Having led many of these initiatives in the past, I can say with certainty that Seal’s Financial Services Suite can help do the job in a fraction of the time and at much lower cost, allowing banks to meet their regulatory and other risk obligations while controlling costs.”
Seal Software estimates that its AI platform has been used for the analysis of in excess of 70 million contracts, and Seal’s single largest vertical industry segment is financial services. Each year Seal hosts its annual Insight conferences in New York, London and San Francisco and features speakers from global leaders in the financial services community who have successfully implemented the Seal platform across a myriad of use cases. The Seal Financial Services Suite is a culmination of Seal’s direct experience with these customers and a reflection of Seal’s market-leading commitment to the financial services community as a whole. More information on Seal’s Financial Services Suite can be found at seal-software.com/industry-financial-services.
