We acted for the Plaintiffs in Axiom Investment Advisors, LLC by and through its Trustee, Gildor Management LLC, v. Barclays Bank PLC et al.
The Complaint
The complaint was that Barclays had deliberately engaged in the practice of ‘Last Look’, whereby client orders to buy or sell, at the dealing price, made by Barclays, were routinely held by Barclays for an artificial delay period, and rejected if subsequent price movements were unfavorable to the bank.
The Brief
Velador Associates were instrumental in the construction of the original class action complaint, providing expert advice from the outset. Barclays agreed to settle the case for $50 million. We were further engaged to prepare a plan of distribution of the settlement fund and construct a claims database. We obtained data from Barclays for this purpose and worked closely with the claims administrator as an integral part of the claims administration process.
The Challenge
The data we received from Barclays included a selection of records of transactions, logs and profit and loss analysis tables. The documents contained a plethora of differing fields, making simple transposition impossible. In total we cross-referenced and analysed 40 different file configurations, all of which needed to be cleaned and standardised.
In aggregate we analysed and cleaned in excess of 300 gigabytes of data. In order to expedite the pattern analysis, we designed a series of python programs and SQL databases to handle the volume of data efficiently.
The Outcome
Barclays agreed to a $50 million settlement.
Our intimate knowledge of the structure of the foreign exchange market, combined with our quantitative skills, enabled the plan of distribution to be approved by the court, with no objections from class members.