Mark is a senior consultant in the Financial Services & Markets Department, having been one of the founding partners of the department and formerly Head of the firm's Financial Products and Payments Group. As a partner, Mark also held senior positions in a number of the firm's governance functions, including those relating to Brexit and client conflicts/confidentiality.
He advises on a broad range of financial services and markets issues including securities trading, clearing, settlement, payments, derivatives, custody, insolvency, banking, FinTech and financial product development. Mark has particular expertise in advising the operators of systemically important financial market infrastructure, including payment systems, central securities depositories and central banks.
He has been consistently recognised over the past 20 years or so as a leading individual in the financial services and markets space. He has been inducted to The Legal 500's "Hall of Fame", which aims to highlight individuals "who have received constant praise by their clients for continued excellence and law firm partners who are at the pinnacle of the profession". Mark is recognised by Chambers and Partners UK as a "Senior Statesperson" for Financial Services (Non-Contentious) Law and Payments Law and as an "expert consultant" in the IFLR 1000. He is also named in the Best Lawyers 2023 edition as "Lawyer of the Year" in Financial Services in London; this award is based soley on peer-reviews in the legal profession and only one lawyer per practice area is recognised.
Mark has a market-leading reputation for advising on complex, innovative and paradigm-shifting financial market infrastructure projects of systemic importance. He has previously led the firm's work on the legal, regulatory and contractual models underpinning the provision of real-time delivery-versus-payment facilities for the UK and Irish securities markets (for which his team was "highly commended for innovation" in the Financial Times Innovative Lawyers Awards), the dematerialisation of the UK's money markets (for which his team won 'Corporate Team of the Year' in The Lawyer Awards) and the new UK payment system for the image processing of cheques and other paper instruments. Most recently, Mark played an important role in the Travers Smith team that won the "Moving the Market Forward" FT Innovative Lawyers Award in 2021 for the launch of a new Euro payments mechanism with systemic importance for the market.
Mark is an active member of the Financial Law Committee of the City of London Law Society and chairs its intermediated securities sub-committee. He is an erstwhile member of the FMLC's Financial Market Infrastructure Scoping Forum. He remains a key participant in various expert working groups invited by the CLLS, FMLC and HM Treasury to assist on a diverse range of financial markets issues, including the regulation of financial market infrastructures, cryptoassets and distributed ledger technologies; securities laws; "good faith" and financial contracts; market disruption; settlement finality; conflict of laws; and financial collateral.
He is also a contributor to Yeowart & Parsons on The Law of Financial Collateral.