The global law firm of Reed Smith has appointed Douglas Cherry to help banks, broker-dealers, investment management firms and other regulated firms with their compliance problems.

Cherry will provide rulebook-related advice and enforcement-related advice to regulated firms  in the United Kingdom, where he is based. He joins a team of more than 30 regulatory lawyers that specialise in financial services. His experience includes:

• representing investment banking clients when Financial Conduct Authority enforcement investigators were accusing them of falling foul of the client asset regime, conducting unauthorised trades and insider dealing;
• providing preventative regulatory advice to investment management clients (both retail and wholesale) in respect of money-laundering control, suspicious activity reporting and associated financial crime issues;
• representing clients in FCA investigations relating to these topics;
• representing senior bankers, asset managers and brokers on separate FCA investigations when the FCA was alleging that they had failed to act with integrity, lacked professional competence and were suffering from conflicts of interest;
• telling firms how to apply to be regulated;
• giving firms advice about changes in control applications, transaction reporting requirements, the expectations of the FCA and Prudential Regulation Authority as regards notification and reporting and helping others with their responses to the FCA's supervisory division on these topics; and
• providing regulatory advice to consumer credit firms when the FCA was alleging that their product sales practices were poor.