Lenz & Staehelin advised Vontobel Group on strategic IT partnership with T-Systems Schweiz AG

Lenz & Staehelin has advised the Swiss private bank and securities trading house Vontobel Group on the set-up of its securities insourcing services, which now will include an exclusive IT/Application Service Providing (ASP) partnership with T-Systems Schweiz AG, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

Vontobel will offer transaction bank services and make its established securities platform available to other banks. Client banks are thus able to outsource the combined execution, global custody and client custody services to a single source that covers the most important, most complex and most resource-intensive areas of securities settlement and administration. Vontobel will act as the contractual partner and cover the actual banking processes (execution and custody), while T-Systems will be responsible for project implementation, the running of the IT infrastructure and applications management.

There is no other cooperation of this depth and scale in the securities business in the Swiss banking market today – particularly in terms of the number of client portfolios, transactions and securities positions involved.

The legal team of Lenz & Staehelin was led by partner Lukas Morscher and senior associate Christian Rehm.

The main legal challenge was to implement the transaction bank business case by creating an overall contractual concept and respective individual agreements among the various parties involved in the securites insourcing services of Vontobel (such as banking solution provider Avaloq, strategic IT partner T-Systems, other IT providers and consultants, existing client bank Raiffeisen Switzerland and the future client banks). Particular attention had to be given to the banking regulatory aspects of the cooperation, including banking secrecy, data security and integrity, protection of data privacy and general confidentiality in order to safeguard the interests of the banks and bank clients involved.