What are the most significant cases or transactions that you have been involved in over the past year?

One of the main cases concerned relaxing licensing requirement to expand our 4-wheel ride hailing and postal delivery product in cluster cities of Ho Chi Minh City: in this project the legal team was required to adopt a more relaxed and carefully considered licensing requirement. The questions were a grey area in the regulations since they have been interpreted differently by the regulators from time to time. After carefully evaluating the factual risk and noticing that the regulators are more and more relaxed when applying the regulation, we removed all licensing requirements and paved the way for geo-expansion in any city in Vietnam for those products.

I also led the task force team in preparing the postal activity review by ministerial authorities and obtaining their endorsement on good compliance with postal regulations. I also worked with our data protection team to review data compliance with the Vietnam business team and submit on time all data compliance dossiers to the Ministry of Public Security. I also acted as data privacy coordinator for Gojek Vietnam. This provided great opportunities to connect and keep in touch with all practical matters of data for Gojek Vietnam and learn from international data compliance practices in Singapore and Indonesia.

I have supported our internal group compliance team and the public policy and government relationship team to agree and adopt the local rules for Vietnam, including matching the expectations of both teams and observing the strict legal advice from external counsel. As a result, both teams landed on a more adaptive government-engagement rule while upholding our group’s compliance policies in Vietnam.

Based on your experience, what is the key to collaborating successfully with business partners?

Communication is key to success.

Within the organisation, it is much easier to provide clear, concise and easy to understand language. I notice that sometimes it is simpler with the business team if we explain our advice in just a simple logical way, and an in-house legal counsel do not need to secure all aspects as we speak.

Out of the organisation, we are required to wear many hats in communicating with external partners and local regulators. Sometimes we need to speak to negotiate, to convince or even hold our position by just delivering our arguments nicely.

Which political, economic or regulatory changes have impacted your work the most in the past year?

Vietnam’s legal framework on technology sector is developing fast. During the last few years, there have been new regulations on data protection, payment compliance, cybersecurity and many other on-going drafts. The regulators are also learning to administer the new technology in Vietnam and sometimes approaching the enterprise with a learning-spirit. It is a stable and very open environment for technology companies in Vietnam to grow up and worry less about legal risks.