Frequently described as the world’s most important number because it underpins trillions of dollars of transactions, the London interbank offered rate (Libor) has persisted until now despite a scandal that caused lasting reputational damage to the entire financial system.
Libor is the key interest rate benchmark for mortgages, loans and contracts but it has been tainted since 2012 when it emerged that banks had misstated their Libor rate submissions, often in collusion, to make better returns.
The controversy led to at least five traders going to jail in the UK, and US and UK regulators extracting penalties totalling about $10bn. Regulators want Libor phased out by December 31 2021, and banks are pivoting to alternative risk-free rates such as Sonia (sterling overnight interbank average rate).
Its demise is already a headache for law firms and banking clients, which must examine hundreds of thousands of legal contracts containing references to the Libor rate and then rewrite and “repaper” them to ensure they include the new reference rates. Contracts must also be analysed for “fallbacks”, the legal rules that spell out what would happen if Libor ceased to exist.
‘Defcon 1 litigation event’
The scale of the repapering exercise is dubbed “immense” by those involved and last year was publicly described as a potential “Defcon 1 litigation event” by Michael Held, general counsel at the New York Federal Reserve.
This has led many law firms and their bank clients to turn to artificial intelligence (AI) technology, often provided by start-ups, which can review large numbers of documents using natural-language processing to identify legal clauses and obligations. Harnessing technology to do the grunt work means banks can avoid paying for armies of sleep-deprived junior lawyers and paralegals to sift through contracts, which in some cases may still be paper documents.
“It is possible to train AI to look for Libor or how Libor is referenced in various guises and to do that in various languages,” says Deepak Sitlani, head of the derivatives and structured products group at law firm Linklaters in London, who says some clients have developed their own technology tools.
“This is taking up a lot of resources and if you are a bank it’s a massive project,” says Adam Ryan, chief legal innovation officer at law firm Freshfields.
Lewis Liu, chief executive of Eigen Technologies, a natural-language processing company that works with banks such as ING and Goldman Sachs, estimates that about half its work this year is from clients using technology to help ease the switch from Libor.
Eigen’s technology helps automate the process of finding and flagging the contracts and then identifying the types of remediation needed. However, the technology cannot write a new contract or carry out repapering work.
Mr Liu says banks are at different stages of readiness, despite the regulators urging them to make progress on leaving Libor. “I know of one big US investment bank [that] has completed its programme and another bank [that] has not yet started the work,” he says. One bank has even opted to review contracts manually with the help of lawyers rather than use technology.
For a large wholesale bank, he estimates, it could take 1,000 lawyers more than two years to identify and switch over all its contracts manually, whereas technology can do this in four months with 20 paralegals and lawyers. The attraction is not just speed, he adds: “Banks are using it as an opportunity to do large-scale digitalisation of their documents,” he says.
In the past few years AI has been deployed in litigation cases to help large companies scan databases or email archives to find a particular word or search term, and then apply relevant changes.
Charlie Connor, chief executive and co-founder of US-based Heretik, says machine learning is being used in a sophisticated way for the Libor transition.
It enables a 700-page Libor contract to be searched and even to pick up punctuation and the part of the sentence that would determine the remediation strategy. Contract disputes in the past have turned on punctuation such as a misplaced Oxford comma — a mark that comes before the “and” or “or” at the end of a list but which can change the meaning of a sentence.
Mr Connor says the Libor transition is making banks digitise paper contracts that might be scattered in various offices. “Banks and financial institutions are being forced into digitisation through Libor and can see its benefits,” says Mr Connor. “The software is very effective and it means law firms will be doing less mundane tasks and more higher-quality work, which is what counsel is paid for.”
He says doing this work now means that the same AI technology can be used to examine contracts en masse for other financial risk factors, such as negative interest rates. “You can run it to look at the effect of negative interest rates which could be impacted by, for example, Brexit,” he says.
Some lawyers suggest that while the biggest effect of the Libor transition will be on leading banks, other non-financial services companies could also be involved if they use Libor-related business contracts to buy and sell goods, for instance, for late-payment clauses or cost increases in long-dated contracts.
If no replacement for the Libor rate has been specified in a contract, the two parties would then have to decide what other benchmark to use. “If there is money involved there might be a fight about it,” says one lawyer, who declines to be named. He also suggests that banks could start to use the replacement of Libor as an opportunity to reopen older contracts with customers and renegotiate other terms.
For now, it is clear that the task of extracting the industry from using Libor cannot be left by banks and corporates till next year, even if they are already grappling with more immediate priorities such as the coronavirus pandemic and the departure of the UK from the EU.
The case studies below are a shortlist of entries to the FT Intelligent Business awards event held online on November 19, where the winner of the Financial Services award was announced.
All the entries showcase the combined use of data and tech in business operations. Source: RSG Consulting
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