A consortium formed by legal firms to explore the use of a new automated document exchange standard for capital markets firms has held its second meeting with participation from a swathe of banks and stock exchanges.
The General-purpose Legal Mark-up Language (GLML) Consortium was formed by international law firms Allen & Overy, Clifford Chance, Latham & Watkins and Linklaters together with Nivaura, a regulated fintech company focused on primary market digitisation and automation.
GLML is open source and can be read by both machines and humans and applied to any form of financial product documentation.
The second meeting of the Consortium, which focused on on the complex data flows that currently exist between market participants, attracted new players from across the industry, including Barclays, Banco Santander, BNY Mellon, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, DBS, Euroclear, HSBC, NatWest Markets, London Stock Exchange Group, Singapore Exchange and UBS.
Marcus Austin of Citi states: “GLML is interesting because the use of data in highly efficient and bite-sized formats can produce significant cost savings for institutions operating in the capital markets.” He adds that “lawyers play a significant role here as aggregators of the data”.
Shrey Kohli of London Stock Exchange Group, welcomed the initiative. “Financial market infrastructure providers collect, aggregate and disseminate a large amount of data from legal documents,” he states. “Significant value and savings can be generated for participants, such as issuers, by using structured data through the life-cycle of a financial instrument.”
The GLML Consortium expects to expand its membership this year to include an even wider group of capital markets participants and technology companies in an effort to drive the project forward.