Assignment and Novation

Assignment is a firm transferring its rights under a client agreement to someone else; novation is replacing the agreement altogether with an identical one against a different company. Novation is the one that matters, because it changes who the client's counterparty is. It normally requires the client's agreement, and the clause is usually drafted so that agreement is given in advance, by accepting the terms, with notice rather than a fresh signature. This is the mechanism by which an account is moved from one company in a group to another. Nothing visible changes — same platform, same login, same support — while the authorisation covering the account, the compensation arrangements that apply to the money, the complaints route and the governing law can all change at once, because every one of them attaches to the entity rather than to the brand. The same clause almost always forbids the client from assigning in the other direction. Reading it means knowing what a notice of transfer is actually announcing, since the window to object is defined by the notice provisions rather than by the transfer itself.