AFTAs 2016: Best Compliance Initiative—JPMorgan Chase

For an institution the size of JPMorgan, that complexity is displayed through the sheer volume of differing legal contracts and obligations with various clients, third-party institutions and intermediaries that exist across its lines of business.

The banking giant launched its Global Legal Agreement Portal (GLAP) as a solution for this space, and to meet federal regulatory and reporting requirements through centralizing key legal agreement data, such as parties to agreements, interdependencies and terms including collateral, cross-defaults and changes of control.

“Prior to this initiative, the agreements data was in silos without any overarching framework to search, analyze and present data to gain meaningful insights,” says Richard Charlino, managing director at JPMorgan Asset Management. “The process of negotiating contracts, amendments and tagging them with business-specific information was handled differently by different business groups. GLAP standardizes the process and provides regulatory control over contract negotiation, categorization, amendments management, and reporting.”

GLAP provides a focal point for risk control, point-of-trade counterparties, client and intermediary onboarding, and foreign-exchange data. It is essentially a “golden source” for this data that is secure and auditable, and is particularly important given the regulatory requirements for greater investor protection and transparency.

The portal has also been developed with a significant focus placed on the user experience, leveraging open-standard frameworks such as Angular JS/Bootstrap, while the user interface is automatically rendered through user-defined business rules. This, in turn, allows users to add attributes and modify the system experience in real time, without the need for technical intervention. Due to that fact that it was developed on open standard technology, GLAP has no dependency on vendors.

The banking giant launched its Global Legal Agreement Portal as a solution for this space, and to meet federal regulatory and reporting requirements through centralizing key legal agreement data, such as parties to agreements, interdependencies and terms including collateral, cross-defaults and changes of control.

Looking forward, Charlino says that an extended “chain of custody” to track changes, enhanced analytics functionality, extended features for disclosures and prospectus management, new workflows for agreement negotiation, and tools for agreement template management and approval are all in the pipeline as future GLAP developments.