Financial Services Regulation
From compliance to commercial advantage
Stay ahead of regulatory change with advice built for the pace of modern financial services.
In financial services, regulatory complexity isn’t just a feature; it can be an opportunity. In Canada and globally, regulators are tightening oversight, coordinating investigations, and raising expectations around governance, consumer protection, technology risk, and financial crime. In this environment, navigating compliance isn’t only about avoiding missteps; it’s a way to move decisively, build trust, and keep your organization focused on what matters most.
Work with legal professionals who understand regulation from the inside out, have operated within major financial institutions, collaborated directly with regulators, and helped shape the frameworks now defining the future of financial services. Whether you’re scaling a fintech, transforming an established bank or insurance business, or offering financial products and services to customers across global markets, we help you connect the dots across jurisdictions, interpret new rules in context, and make critical forward-looking decisions.
Strategies for a sector in motion
Blending advanced technical depth with a practical, business-minded perspective, we deliver tailored guidance that reflects what it takes to stay compliant without losing momentum.
Here’s what sets us apart:
Advice from the front lines: Many of our professionals have served as in-house counsel at some of the world’s largest financial institutions or worked directly with regulators. This hands-on experience translates into inside-out guidance on how decisions are made, how issues escalate, and what regulators really look for during reviews, examinations, and investigations.
Deep cross-border fluency: Drawing on expertise from across our global platform, including offices across Canada, the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, we guide you through the interplay of international frameworks, helping you navigate multi-jurisdictional regulatory obligations, structure products for multiple markets, and anticipate the ripple effects of global trends on your business.
Future-focused, tech-driven insight: From open banking to AI-powered platforms, the future of financial services is unfolding in real-time. As an innovation-driven law firm, we help you navigate and embrace emerging technologies with advice anchored in evolving regulatory expectations, the shifting risk environment, and the real-world demands of bringing innovation to market.
Integrated strategies: We work across a range of practice areas to help you tackle complex, multi-faceted issues, including in relation to technology, securities, competition and antitrust, restructuring and insolvency, and tax. Whether you’re seeking approvals, responding to supervisory inquiries, or launching new products and programs, we deliver seamless advice to support your growth.
“Regulation will keep evolving. Your advantage lies in anticipating what’s coming next and building it into how your business grows, innovates and competes.”
— Alana Scotchmer, Partner
Solutions for your world
You can trust us to deliver informed end-to-end guidance that adapts to your structure, your risk profile, and your ambitions, not the other way around. Explore our services:
Fintech, payments, and emerging technologies
We support the launch and scaling of innovative financial products and services, from payment services and e-money platforms to digital asset businesses, peer-to-peer models, and open-banking solutions, with pragmatic and informed guidance on market entry, licensing, risk, and ongoing compliance.
Regulatory approvals and authorizations
Anti–money laundering, terrorist financing, and investigations
Product development and market expansion
National security, governance, and operational resilience
Whistleblowing and market conduct
Fintech, payments, and emerging technologies
We support the launch and scaling of innovative financial products and services, from payment services and e-money platforms to digital asset businesses, peer-to-peer models, and open-banking solutions, with pragmatic and informed guidance on market entry, licensing, risk, and ongoing compliance.
Regulatory approvals and authorizations
From licensing to transactions, we help you secure approvals efficiently and operationalize regulatory expectations to hold up over time. Our work includes applications for approvals and orders from the Minister of Finance and OSFI, technical opinions under the Bank Act and Insurance Companies Act, remediation support where risk is identified, and advice on implementing federal consumer protection requirements. We also advise on provincial and territorial legislation and market differences.
Anti–money laundering, terrorist financing, and investigations
We help you design and strengthen anti-money laundering/anti-terrorist financing compliance and reporting frameworks, manage sanctions and financial crime risk exposures, and respond to internal audit and regulatory inquiries and investigations. We support you through examinations, remediation, and enforcement proceedings under Canada’s AML/ATF regime, including in cross-border contexts.
Product development and market expansion
Whether you’re launching a new banking, insurance, or investment product, or entering a new market, we help you anticipate product-side rules, prudential requirements, and market conduct expectations so you can move faster while managing exposure. We also offer our clients on-the-ground support for Québec-specific compliance obligations and required translations.
National security, governance, and operational resilience
We help you build programs that stand up to scrutiny, from outsourcing and third-party risk management to payments infrastructure, cyber and data protection, and other operational obligations that regulators increasingly expect to see embedded, not bolted on. We help you address emerging focuses of regulatory scrutiny such as national security, people and culture risk, and changing governance expectations.
Whistleblowing and market conduct
We advise on whistleblowing regimes, market abuse risk, insider dealing, and the expectations shaping culture and conduct in financial institutions, helping you respond appropriately and strengthen controls before issues escalate.
