Business
D2LT Thought Leadership

Source: Finance Derivative
Smart Legal Contracts – not a smart direction
Does the arrival of smart legal contracts presage the “Susskindesque end of lawyers”, genuinely creating the scenario of “Code Is Law”? Of course not, says Akber Datoo, CEO, D2 Legal Technology, rather, it creates both opportunities and challenges as part of the broader digital agenda.
As both a lawyer and a computer scientist, Akber explains why smart legal contracts increase, not decrease, the need for both the law and lawyers – and calls for legal experts to rapidly extend their skill set to embrace technology and data.
Maturity Curve
There are no specific barriers in English Law to the adoption of smart legal contracts. Defined by the Law Commission as: “A legally binding contract in which some or all of the contractual terms are defined in and/or performed automatically by a computer program”, their work in this area published on 25 November 20211, states: “We have concluded that the current legal framework is clearly able to facilitate and support the use of smart legal contracts. Current legal principles can apply to smart legal contracts in much the same way as they do to traditional contracts, albeit with an incremental and principled development of the common law in specific contexts. In general, difficulties associated with applying the existing law to smart legal contracts are not unique to them, and could equally arise in the context of traditional contracts.”
Clearly, the definition and this statement is just the beginning of the journey, seeking to encourage innovation to fulfil the commercial promise of the Smart Legal Contract – which is compelling. It is expected to revolutionise business over the next decade. Its adoption is, however, not without its challenges – as arguably, is any significant evolution in any field.
The Solution to Trust is not just the Immutable Contract
As soon as a smart legal contract is placed on a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), the agreed automation is unchangeable. On the one hand, this is the very attraction – removing the need for trust between both parties – the trust is placed in the code. But that also means any failure in that code cannot be amended. Essentially, while the smart legal contract is not immune to legal intervention and other forms of governance, resolving a problem is extremely difficult.
For example, what happens if it turns out the smart legal contract was illegal? If there was fraud involved? If someone made a coding error? Or simply that circumstances have changed? The automation cannot be stopped. Even if the courts might rule that it should stop, the technology cannot be halted. The only option will be to set up some form of reverse transaction to make the adjustment. Far from an ideal situation.
The use of DLTs for smart legal contracts highlights a severe lack of ‘after the event protection’. Traditional contracts encourage the growth of trust during relationships between the parties, especially relationship level agreements such as the ISDA Master Agreement (“famously referred to by J Briggs in the Court of Appeal as ‘[…] probably the most important standard market agreement used in the financial world”)2. They include flexible tools, such as the use of elastic and flexible terms such as ‘acting reasonably’ and ‘good faith’. In addition to this, there is the ability to seek mutually acceptable outcomes should the truly unexpected occur to the surprise of the parties, through mediation, arbitration – or the backstop of the courts themselves.
These are not concepts that can be applied to the purist “code is law” philosophy that underpins some views of how smart legal contracts ought to evolve. This results in a language of automation that is restrictive to business and the code unstoppable. Yes, we require a degree of immutability and automation – but the law is king over code, and smart legal contracts need to be designed to allow the law to intervene if we are going to allow the use of smart legal contracts for serious commercial transactions.
Lawyer Imperative
To make smart legal contracts work correctly given their immutability and automated nature, both parties need to know – or attempt to know – every possible event that may happen in the future which is, of course, impractical for most reasonably complex business transactions. Who has the expertise to ensure that every contingency (including mandatory actions ordered by a court of law) are considered and agreed between the parties (in the code)? The truth is, even in order to imagine and provide for some of those scenarios if we are going to empower the code, the role of the lawyer will become more important than ever.
A large part of a lawyer’s job is to tease out the needs and desires of a client, smoothing out contradictions and flagging potential eventualities. Programming a smart legal contract is tantamount to translating those intentions into code – which is great, if both parties are in control of that code. Yet the model being proposed by many in the industry is for lawyers to design the smart legal contract as usual and then hand it over to a developer to draft the code.
Traditional contract interpretation is hard enough. This new world merely exacerbates the difficulties. Does the coder truly understand the law effect being sought by the lawyer? Does the lawyer truly understand the operation of the code being put in place by the developers? Any mistakes, any errors or misinterpretations will have a significant and severe impact because the smart legal contract is (as suggested above), largely immutable. It is now vital for lawyers to understand code and operate in this digital sphere. Lawyers need to be able to test a software program, just as they test scenarios anticipated by a contractual clause today. The difference will be rather than using natural language prose, the testing will be done through the context of high-level programming code – debugging through the code (that does look like natural language – yes, Solidity, Rust, Vyper and other smart legal contract code is not practically written in 1s and 0s, rather resembles natural language by design!).
Limiting Effect
Smart legal contracts are a long way from reaching maturity. There are many issues to address. As noted above, a degree of reversibility will have to be created, otherwise there will be a finite limit on the potential complexity and value of these automated agreements. But the shift is hugely exciting and offers enormous potential to the industry – if the right steps are taken.
Calls from some quarters for smart legal contracts to be based upon natural language so that they can be understood by judges will place a serious limit on the extent to which they can be deployed. Challenges around the management of complexity will constrain the use of automation with any degree of sophistication. It will also create the risk that firms could be sued for negligence due to mistakes in the coding phase leading to contracts failing to achieve the goals of both parties. Calling for natural language and translation is a short-sighted approach and one that will not only delay the inevitable increasing adoption of automation but also add complex layers of failure.
Smart legal contracts offer a great deal of promise. However, there is a huge amount to be done by the legal community to embrace, explore and understand if that promise is to be realised. Not only will skills and toolkits need to change, but lawyers must play an imperative role in understanding the true limits of automation and determining where good, old fashioned human judgement remains king. The onus is now on lawyers to take ownership of smart legal contracts, discover and embrace new skills and gain the confidence required to accelerate maturity – without that committed smart legal contracts will, at best, fail to deliver on their promise and, at worst, create a global legal mire that could take generations to unpick.
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Business
Enhancing cybersecurity in investment firms as new regulations come into force

Source: Finance Derivative
Christian Scott, COO/CISO at Gotham Security, an Abacus Group Company
The alternative investment industry is a prime target for cyber breaches. February’s ransomware attack on global financial software firm ION Group was a warning to the wider sector. Russia-linked LockBit Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) affiliate hackers disrupted trading activities in international markets, with firms forced to fall back on expensive, inefficient, and potentially non-compliant manual reporting methods. Not only do attacks like these put critical business operations under threat, but firms also risk falling foul of regulations if they lack a sufficient incident response plan.
To ensure that firms protect client assets and keep pace with evolving challenges, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has proposed new cybersecurity requirements for registered advisors and funds. Codifying previous guidance into non-negotiable rules, these requirements will cover every aspect of the security lifecycle and the specific processes a firm implements, encompassing written policies and procedures, transparent governance records, and the timely disclosure of all material cybersecurity incidents to regulators and investors. Failure to comply with the rules could carry significant financial, legal, and national security implications.
The proposed SEC rules are expected to come into force in the coming months, following a notice and comment period. However, businesses should not drag their feet in making the necessary adjustments – the SEC has also introduced an extensive lookback period preceding the implementation of the rules, meaning that organisations should already be proving they are meeting these heightened demands.
For investment firms, regulatory developments such as these will help boost cyber resilience and client confidence in the safety of investments. However, with a clear expectation that firms should be well aligned to the requirements already, many will need to proactively step up their security oversight and strengthen their technologies, policies, end-user education, and incident response procedures. So, how can organisations prepare for enforcement and maintain compliance in a shifting regulatory landscape?
Changing demands
In today’s complex, fast-changing, and interconnected business environment, the alternative investment sector must continually take account of its evolving risk profile. Additionally, as more and more organisations shift towards more distributed and flexible ways of working, traditional protection perimeters are dissolving, rendering firms more vulnerable to cyber-attack.
As such, the new SEC rules provide firms with additional instruction around very specific prescriptive requirements. Organisations need to implement and maintain robust written policies and procedures that closely align with ground-level security issues and industry best practices, such as the NIST Cybersecurity framework. Firms must also be ready to gather and present evidence that proves they are following these watertight policies and procedures on a day-to-day basis. With much less room for ambiguity or assumption, the SEC will scrutinise security policies for detail on how a firm is dealing with cyber risks. Documentation must therefore include comprehensive coverage for business continuity planning and incident response.
As cyber risk management comes increasingly under the spotlight, firms need to ensure it is fully incorporated as a ‘business as usual’ process. This involves the continual tracking and categorisation of evolving vulnerabilities – not just from a technology perspective, but also from an administrative and physical standpoint. Regular risk assessments must include real-time threat and vulnerability management to detect, mitigate, and remediate cybersecurity risks.
Another crucial aspect of the new rules is the need to report any ‘material’ cybersecurity incidents to investors and regulators within a 48-hour timeframe – a small window for busy investment firms. Meeting this tight deadline will require firms to quickly pull data from many different sources, as the SEC will demand to know what happened, how the incident was addressed, and its specific impacts. Teams will need to be assembled well in advance, working together seamlessly to record, process, summarise, and report key information in a squeezed timeframe.
Funds and advisors will also need to provide prospective and current investors with updated disclosures on previously disclosed cybersecurity incidents over the past two fiscal years. With security leaders increasingly being held to account over lack of disclosure, failure to report incidents at board level could even be considered an act of fraud.
Keeping pace
Organisations must now take proactive steps to prepare and respond effectively to these upcoming regulatory changes. Cybersecurity policies, incident response, and continuity plans need to be written up and closely aligned with business objectives. These policies and procedures should be backed up with robust evidence that shows organisations are actually following the documentation – firms need to prove it, not just say it. Carefully thought-out policies will also provide the foundation for organisations to evolve their posture as cyber threats escalate and regulatory demands change.
Robust cybersecurity risk assessments and continuous vulnerability management must also be in place. The first stage of mitigating a cyber risk is understanding the threat – and this requires in-depth real-time insights on how the attack surface is changing. Internal and external systems should be regularly scanned, and firms must integrate third-party and vendor risk assessments to identify any potential supply chain weaknesses.
Network and cloud penetration testing is another key tenet of compliance. By imitating how an attacker would exploit a vantage point, organisations can check for any weak spots in their strategy before malicious actors attempt to gain an advantage. Due to the rise of ransomware, phishing, and other sophisticated cyber threats, social engineering testing should be conducted alongside conventional penetration testing to cover every attack vector.
It must also be remembered that security and compliance is the responsibility of every person in the organisation. End-user education is a necessity as regulations evolve, as is multi-layered training exercises. This means bringing in immersive simulations, tabletop exercises and real-world examples of security incidents to inform employees of the potential risks and the role they play in protecting the company.
To successfully navigate the SEC cybersecurity rules – and prepare for future regulatory changes – alternative investment firms must ensure that security is woven into every part of the business. They can do this by establishing robust written policies and adhesion, conducting regular penetration testing and vulnerability scanning, and ensuring the ongoing education and training of employees.
Business
Gearing up for growth amid economic pressure: 10 top tips for maintaining control of IT costs

Source: Finance Derivative
By Dirk Martin, CEO and Founder of Serviceware
Three years on from the pandemic and economic pressure is continuing to mount more than ever. With the ongoing threat of a global recession looming, inflation rising, and supply chain disruption continuing to take its toll, cutting costs and optimizing budgets remains a top priority amongst the c-suite. Amid such turbulence, the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) stand firmly at the business’s helm, not only to steady the ship but to steer it into safer, more profitable waters. These vital roles have truly been pulled into the spotlight in recent years, with new hurdles and challenges being constantly thrown their way. This spring, for example, experts expect British businesses to face an energy-cost cliff edge as the winter support package set out by the government is replaced.
Whilst purse strings are being drawn ever tighter to overcome these obstacles, there is no denying that the digitalization and innovation spurred on by the pandemic are still gaining momentum. In fact, according to Gartner, four out of five CEOs are increasing digital technology investments to counter current economic pressures. Investing in a digital future, driven by technologies such as the Cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchains and the Internet of Things (IoT), however, comes at a cost and to be able to do so – funds must be released through effective optimization of existing assets.
With that in mind, and with the deluge of cost and vendor data descending on businesses who adopt these technologies, never has it been more important for CIOs and CFOs to have a complete, detailed and transparent view of all IT costs. In doing so, business leaders can not only identify the right investment areas but increase the performance of existing systems and technology to tackle the impact of spiralling running costs.
Follow the below 10 steps to gain a comprehensive, detailed and transparent overview of all IT costs to boost business performance and enable your IT to reach the next level.
1: Develop an extensive IT service and product catalogue
The development of an IT service and product catalogue is the most effective way to kick-start your cost-optimization journey. This catalogue should act as a precise overview of all individual IT services and what they entail to directly link IT service costs to IT service performance and value. By offering a clear set of standards as to what services are available and comprised of, consumers can gain an understanding of the costs and values of the IT services they deploy.
2: Monitor IT costs closely
By mastering the value chain, a concept that aims to visualise the flow of IT costs from its most basic singular units through to realised business units and capabilities, businesses can keep track of where IT costs stem from. With the help of service catalogues, benchmarks, the use of a cost model focussing on digital value in IT Financial Management (ITFM) or what is often referred to as Technology Business Management (TBM) solutions, comprehensive access to this data can be guaranteed, creating a ‘cost-to-service flow’ that identifies and controls the availability of IT costs.
3: Determine IT budget management
Knowledge of IT cost allocation is a vital factor when making informed spending decisions and adjustments to existing budgets. There are, however, different approaches that can be taken to this including – centralized, decentralized and iterative. A centralized approach means that the budget is determined in advance and distributed to operating cost centres and projects in a top-down process, allowing for easy, tight budget allocation. A decentralized approach reverses this process – operating costs are precisely calculated before budgeting and projects are determined. Both approaches come with their own risks, for centralized overlooking projects that offer potential growth opportunities and for decentralized budget demands that might exceed available resources.
The iterative approach tries to unify both methods. Although the most lucrative approach, it also requires the most resources. So, the chosen approach is very much dependent on the available resources, and the enterprise’s structural organization.
4: Defining ‘run’ vs ‘grow’ costs
Before IT budget can be allocated, costs should be split into two distinct categories: running costs (i.e. operating costs) and costs for growing the business (i.e. products or services used to transform or grow the business). Once these categories have been defined, decisions should be made on how the budget should be split between them. A 70% run/30% grow split is fairly typical across most enterprises, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and this decision should be centred around the businesses’ overall strategies and end goals.
5: Ensuring investments result in a profit
By carrying out the aforementioned steps, complete transparency can be achieved over which products and services are offered, where IT costs stem from, and where budgets are allocated. From here, organizations can review how much of the IT budget is being used and where costs lead to profits and losses. By maintaining a positive profit margin, the controlling processes can be further optimized. If the profit margin is negative, appropriate, or timely, corrective measures can be initiated.
6: Staying on top of regulation
For a company that operates internationally (E.g. it markets IT products and services abroad), it is extremely important that it stays on top of country-specific compliance and adheres to varying international tax rules. To do so correctly it is necessary to provide correct transfer price documentation. This requires three factors:
- Transparent analysis and calculation of IT services based on the value chain
- Evaluation of the services used and the associated billing processes
- Access to the management of service contracts between providers and consumers as the legal basis for IT services.
7: Stay competitive
Closely linked to the profit mentioned in step five is the question of how to price IT services in order to stay competitive whilst avoiding losses. This begins with benchmark data which can be researched or determined using existing ITFM solutions that can automatically extract them from different – interconnected – databases. From there, a unit cost calculation can be used to define exactly and effectively what individual IT services – and their preliminary products – cost. This allows organizations to easily compare internal unit cost calculations with the benchmarks and competitor prices, before making pricing decisions.
8: Identify and maintain key cost drivers
Another aspect of IT cost control that is streamlined via the comprehensive assessment of the cost-to-service flow is the identification and management of main IT cost drivers. A properly modelled value chain makes it clear which IT services or associated preliminary products and cost centres incur the greatest costs and why. This analysis allows for concise adjustment to expenditure and helps to avoid misunderstandings about cost drivers. Using this as a basis, strategies can be developed to reduce IT costs effectively and determine a better use of expensive resources.
9: Showback/Chargeback IT costs
By controlling IT costs using the value chain, efficient usage-based billing and invoicing of IT services and products can be achieved. If IT costs are visualized transparently, they can easily be assigned to IT customers, therefore increasing the clarity of the billing process, and providing opportunities to analyze the value of IT in more detail. When informing managers and users about their consumption there are two options: either through the ‘showback’ process – highlighting the costs generated and how they are incurred – or through the ‘chargeback’ process, in which costs incurred are sent directly to customers and subcontractors.
10: Analyse supply vs. demand
By following the processes above, transparency regarding IT cost control is further extended and discussions around the value of IT services are made possible across the organization. A more holistic analysis of IT service consumption allows conclusions to be drawn promptly to enable the optimization of supply and demand for IT services in various business areas. This, in turn, will enable a more comprehensive value analysis and optimization of IT service utilization.
Following these 10 cost management steps, a secure, transparent, and sustainable IT cost control environment can be developed, resulting in fully optimized budgets and in turn – significant cost savings. Cost-cutting aside, automating the financial management process in such an environment can boost productivity substantially freeing up time to focus on valuable work, thus leading to overall business growth.
The business and economic landscape is full of uncertainty right now, but business leaders can regain control via cost management, not only to weather current storms but to set themselves up for success beyond today’s turbulence.
Business
Banking on legacy – The risks posed by ‘stone age’ banking infrastructure

Source: Finance Derivative
By Andreas Wuchner, Angel Investor of Venari Security
Introduction
If you consider the most significant motivating factors behind cyber-attacks – the promise of large financial reward and the opportunity to cause maximum business and social disruption – it’s little wonder that banks and financial institutions are amongst the most inviting targets for would-be cyber criminals. In fact, according to IBM’s recent report, ‘banking and finance’ was the most attacked industry for the five years between 2015 and 2020 – surpassed only by threats to critical infrastructure in recent years. Successful attacks can provide aggressors with a mass of sensitive personal and financial information, and even access to people’s money itself. Furthermore, a suspension of withdrawals and deposits can cause huge social disruption and reputational damage.
As banks have reacted to years of new regulation and emerging technologies, they often operate with a hugely complicated and disparate technology estates. This provides malicious actors with a wealth of potential attack vectors. A small breach from anywhere in this network can have enormous consequences, and lead to entire systems being overrun. As such, it’s crucial that security teams operate with the highest-grade security possible, including ensuring the strongest level of encryption standards. Banks need to look beyond regulatory tick-box commitments and ensure they are taking proactive and preventative steps to monitor and combat malicious attacks across their entire network.

However, the ability to react to cyber-threats across a vast estate requires speed and flexibility to quickly react and update security protocols. The sheer volume of legacy infrastructure slows this process down considerably leaving many security teams in a vicious cycle.
The threat of legacy infrastructure
A sizeable proportion of the banking industry still maintains a reliance on systems first developed more than 40 years ago. In fact, many ‘core banking’ systems, like payments, loans, mortgages and the associated technologies, are still coded using COBOL (Common Business-Orientated Language), an otherwise defunct programming language that is older than the internet itself. In the UK and Europe, COBOL remains the ‘backbone of banking services,’ while in the USA, as much as 43% of banking systems are built on COBOL, meaning it underpins much of our financial system.
This presents a huge security risk. While code has been regularly updated over the years, these systems were built when security threats were far less sophisticated, less well-financed and the burden of data was far less pronounced. For several years, governments have pointed towards legacy systems, built using COBOL, as a major cybersecurity threat, incompatible with modern security best practices and solutions, including multi-factor authentication. For example, data from Kaspersky found that businesses with outdated technology are much more likely to have suffered a data breach (65%) than those who keep their technology updated (29%).
A further security consideration is the diminishing number of people who are trained in maintaining COBOL systems. Every year, experienced professionals exit the industry, making it increasingly difficult to service legacy technologies and creating significant delays in patching threats once they’re identified. This lack of supply of sufficiently trained experts, and the demand they face, makes any updates extremely expensive and time consuming.
Furthermore, legacy infrastructure is preventing the secure application of encryption, posing its own distinct cybersecurity and regulatory risks. Encryption is often heralded as a silver bullet solution for data privacy and has been a continuing area of focus for regulatory bodies in recent years. However, banks remain guilty of poor deployment, maintenance and management of encryption – using outdated protocols and inefficient methods of analysing and understanding network traffic. This, coupled with legacy ‘core banking’ systems that are incompatible with modern encryption techniques, equates to a regulatory and security headache for security teams.
Adopting a new mindset
The risks posed by legacy systems and the volume of cybersecurity threats facing banks, mean a concentrated re-think of overall cybersecurity strategy is needed to prevent breaches and ensure data is protected long-term. Traditionally, banks have taken an ‘outside-in’ view – dedicating capacity, finances and knowledge to dealing with threats that are existing, known and well publicised. However, to aid long-term security, this should be superseded by an ‘inside-out’ proactive approach, whereby security teams are cognisant of their own internal systems and where the key vulnerabilities are found. Once banks have a detailed view of the security risks posed by their legacy systems, and specifically what data is threatened, they can address flaws, update these systems and build a stronger overall security posture.
The secure path ahead
Many of our successful high-street banks today have centuries of experience in dealing with social, economic and regulatory upheaval. However, the rapid development and deployment of technology continues to present a unique challenge. Many ‘traditional’ banks have built a complex technology infrastructure through decades of adjustment to new legislation and emerging technologies. While serviceable in the past, fintech start-ups are pushing the long-term viability of these systems to the limit.
Challenger banks have the luxury of being built from the ground-up, prioritising convenient digital services and features, and modern security processes. As the user base of these banks increase, customers are increasingly expecting these features and security from their existing banks, meaning even more complexity added to legacy infrastructures. As outlined by Deloitte, existing firms simply aren’t positioned to support the rising expectation of the market, exposing banks to additional risk and liability.
What’s more, it’s estimated that banks spend as much as 80% of their yearly IT budgets on the maintenance of legacy systems. While an immediate switch away from these systems is unrealistic, there is an opportunity to reduce wasted spend and divert spend towards modernisation efforts. However, while traditional banks may want to adapt quicker to technological advancements, they need to do so while continuing to minimise cyber risk and without jeopardising the security of their data or systems. This means placing cybersecurity at the heart of any modernisation efforts and maintaining a steady rate of change. As more of the technology estate begins to be modernised, the potential risks of regulatory non-compliance will also reduce.
Legacy systems need a considered update
Banking systems have heavily relied on legacy infrastructure for too long now, bringing difficulties in maintaining the highest-grade cybersecurity and in facilitating innovation. The risks presented by novel cybersecurity attack vectors and competition from new and emerging digital services offered by challenger banks are exacerbating these issues. As such, legacy systems need a managed modernisation in the long-term, facilitated in part by a managed redistribution of existing IT spend. However, to ensure long-term security overall, cybersecurity needs to be central to be at the very heart of modernisation efforts.

Enhancing cybersecurity in investment firms as new regulations come into force

Gearing up for growth amid economic pressure: 10 top tips for maintaining control of IT costs

Banking on legacy – The risks posed by ‘stone age’ banking infrastructure

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Hybrid cloud adoption: why vendors are making the switch in 2022 and why you should too
