People
Jodi Norman
Biography
Jodi is Regional Head of Financial Services Regulatory.
She has unrivalled knowledge across the full suite of regulations applicable in the UAE: UAE Central Bank law and regulation, UAE SCA law and regulation, ADGM law and regulation and DIFC law and regulation. She also has capability advising on SAMA/Capital Market Authority (CMA) law and regulation and supports A&O Shearman’s KSA desk on financial services regulatory matters. This regional knowledge is supported by strong working knowledge and experience in UK/EU financial services law and regulation.
Jodi advises many of the world’s leading financial institutions and we have invested in building a team with international support that can provide financial services regulatory advice to clients across all segments of the financial services industry, including: commercial banks, investment banks and broker-dealers (the sell side); asset managers, investment consultants, pension funds and other institutional investors (the buy side), exchanges, multilateral trading facilities and clearing houses (infrastructure providers), as well as regulators and governments on their regulatory frameworks. Increasingly, the clients that she advises includes a broad range of non-traditional financial services providers, such as payment services and cryptoasset providers and fintech start-ups.
Jodi holds a CISI Level 6 Diploma in Investment Compliance, a qualification developed specifically for compliance professionals.
Practice areas
- Finance
- Financial services advisory and regulatory
- Digital assets
Sectors
- Fintech
- Sovereign wealth and institutional investors
Selected experience
- Several government entities on the development of their virtual assets regulatory regimes, including with respect to the issuance of Central Bank Digital Currency, cross-border issuance of virtual assets and the licensing and supervision of virtual assets services providers (VASPs).
- Legislative framework for introducing Special Purpose Acquisition Companies in the UAE.
- Dubai Financial Market on the on the consolidation a rewriting of the entirety of its Markets Rules. This exercise involved the development of two new rulebooks (i) the Listing Rules and (ii) the Markets Rules.
- ADGM FSRA on the development of its sustainable finance regime and drafting the regulatory regime implementing the same. This mandate involved extensive benchmarking of global ESG proposals and right-sizing for the regional market.
- Multiple ‘onshore’ UAE clients on their licence applications to the UAE Central Bank under the UAE Central Bank’s Stored Value Facilities Regulation and Retail Payment Services and Card Schemes Regulation. As both regulations are recently published, our clients were some of the first to submit licensing applications to the UAE Central Bank under these regulations.
- Al Maryah Community Bank on its licence application to the UAE Central Bank to become the UAE’s first wholly digital bank.
- Multiple new entrant DIFC-based clients on their licence applications to the Dubai DFSA to provide payment services on a cross-border basis from the DIFC.
- Multiple new entrant ADGM-based clients on their licence applications to the FSRA to provide a range of services including payment services, virtual asset-related activities and digital private banking services.
- An ‘onshore’ Dubai-based virtual asset exchange on its licence application to the newly established Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. A semi-autonomous zone on its founding laws and regulations across a number of sectors.
- QFMA on the review of its consolidated regulations covering (i) Markets Rules and (ii) Financial Services Rules.
Education
- BA PPE (Hons), Politics, Philosophy and Economics, University of York/University of California, Santa Cruz, 2005
- Level 6 Diploma in Investment Compliance, 2014
- CISI Certificate in DIFC Rules & Regulations, 2012
- CISI Islamic Finance Qualification, 2012
Admissions
- Admitted as a lawyer, Ireland, 2018
- Admitted as a lawyer, England and Wales, 2009
Languages
- English