The Banking & Finance team serves the needs of a wide variety of clients in France and abroad: retail banks, investment banks, investment service providers, institutional investors, insurance companies, industrial and commercial companies and local, national or supranational public authorities. The team assists clients on the legal and tax aspects of transactions, the preparation and negotiation of legal documentation, and advises clients on transactions arranged on their own account.

With the support of the CMS network, the Banking & Finance team takes a fully integrated approach to international transactions in Europe (France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Russia, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, Poland, Czech Republic, Croatia, Spain, Hungary, Serbia Montenegro, Slovakia, Switzerland, Ukraine), South America (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay), Africa (Morocco) and Asia (China).

Financing: our areas of practice

The Banking & Finance team is involved in all areas of corporate finance:

• bilateral or syndicated loans
• finance leases
• international trade financing
• factoring
• cash pooling
• guarantees and mechanisms to secure financial flows
• debt restructuring
• sale of discounted or delinquent debt
• public-sector financing

Our expertise in structured financing

The Banking & Finance team's structured finance work includes all types of financing under which repayment is totally or partially assured by cash flow generated from a specific activity or asset.

• acquisition finance
• project finance or public/private partnership finance
• property finance
• stock financing
• asset backed trade receivables or tax receivables finance
• Islamic finance
• financing of intellectual property rights
• financing of vehicles, ships and aircraft fleets
• financing of machinery or equipment

These transactions require expertise in every aspect of secured or guaranteed lending: pledges, mortgages, financial guarantees etc.

Our expertise in creating special purpose legal entities and our legal and tax knowledge of trust mechanisms enables us to put together structures in which the assets backing the financing can be effectively isolated. With the support of our lawyers specialising in insolvency, we can ensure that these structures can satisfactorily withstand the default or bankruptcy of the party benefiting from the financing.

Our approach

• Ability to deal with complex issues: our team works on innovative cross-border transactions along with our CMS network partners as necessary.
• Synergy of expertise: we call upon the skills of other experts in the firm, notably our tax lawyers, to ensure that the matters to which we are entrusted are dealt with in the best possible manner and that every transaction is fully covered. The firm’s excellence in tax matters enables us, for example, to offer innovative, optimised tax structures in this field.
• Innovative, customised solutions: attentive to our clients, we respond in the best possible way to their present and future needs. Our knowledge of market practices allows us to offer our clients tested solutions although we attach particular importance to ensuring that for each situation or transaction, the solutions we propose and the documentation that is drawn up correspond effectively to the real needs of our clients.
• Monitoring of transactions: we are well placed to respond to the requirements of our clients both for new matters as well as for the monitoring or unwinding of current transactions.