Specialist Counsel hire for CMS Financial Services

CMS is pleased to announce the appointment of Susann Altkemper to the firm’s Financial Services & Products team. Susann joins CMS as Counsel, having spent seven years as an in-house legal advisor and consultant to Euroclear UK & Ireland Limited, the operator of the CREST settlement system.

Previous to this, Susann was an assistant in the financial services team at CMS for over six years. During that time Susann advised financial institutions and corporates on a range of regulatory and commercial matters, including with regard to their MiFID projects, on cross-border issues, the approved persons regime, product design, outsourcing matters and regulator investigations.

Susann has significant knowledge of the regulatory framework governing different types of financial market infrastructure, the Bank of England’s approach to supervision and global regulatory developments affecting FMIs and their users. At the time of the Lehman collapse Susann helped settlement banks deal with the CREST aspects of the participant default, settlement finality issues and realisation of their floating charge arrangements through the so-called fast-track procedure. Susann worked on a wide-range of matters concerning CREST/securities settlement, including with regard to FCA’s client asset regime, client money/asset segregation, custody arrangements, settlement discipline, transaction reporting as well as other general compliance issues such as AML/KYC procedures and financial sanctions.

CMS’ Head of Financial Services, Paul Edmondson, commented: “We are pleased that Susann is re-joining our team. She brings with her an in-depth knowledge relating to the supervision and regulation of, and the issues affecting, financial market infrastructure, and will be a real asset to the team.”

Commenting on her appointment, Susann said: “It is great to be joining CMS at such an exciting time when central securities depositories, central counterparties and other market participants are grappling with an ever increasing influx of financial market regulation. The impacts of CSDR, EMIR and MiFID/MiFIR together with changes in financial technology not only create a huge burden for FMIs and the market but also present new opportunities. I am looking forward to helping our clients manage and overcome these regulatory challenges and providing them with practical advice that they can act on.”