Allen & Overy has re-launched its derivatives services business as aosphere at a crucial time for financial institution clients, who are facing a combination of increasing compliance requirements, reduced budgets and significant financial consequences should they be found to be in breach of regulatory obligations.

Marc-Henri Chamay, managing director of e-business at Allen & Overy and CEO at aosphere, said: “We are seeing increasing demand from clients all over the world for reliable compliance and risk management solutions that are cost effective and which present information in ways that can be easily understood, by lawyers and non-lawyers alike.”

Derivatives Services was established in 2001 focusing on the over-the-counter derivatives market with products such as netalytics and CSAnalytics.

Since then, and in light of the spate of new regulation in the financial institutions space such as MiFID II, the Transparency Directive and AIFMD, it has expanded to offer a wider range of high quality, online compliance and legal risk products which provide detailed cross-border legal information presented in an innovative, easily navigable format.

Each product turns these complex areas of the law into easy-to-use, color-coded guides to the myriad rules that apply in different jurisdictions.

New product areas created by the aosphere group of around 25 senior lawyers and support staff cover shareholding disclosure, marketing restrictions and cross border data transfer.

Prototypes for new services to cover G20 reporting requirements and derivatives clearing are currently in development.

“It is this high quality advice and expertise in compliance issues made accessible at a low cost which has enabled our significant growth over the past few years,” Chamay said.

The service has over 200 client institutions from around the globe and around 9500 individual user accounts.

“We have gone from a subscription base of 40 institutions at the start of the financial crisis in 2008 to over 200 today, with an average subscription renewal rate of 97%, and we anticipate that this will only continue,” he added.