Team size: Eleven

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

Together with Legal Vietnam, I have collaborated, and partner across teams, and departments, tackled challenges, and roadblocks during the credit, and documentation process, and worked together to complete HSBC’s transactions, including first of its kind in the market. For example, apart from various successful landmark deals, HSBC has completed Vietnam’s first live pilot Blockchain domestic Letter-of-Credit transaction, implemented jointly with Vietcombank; the Sustainable Linked Loan agreement with Gemadept.

This year, HSBC Vietnam has gone through several routine inspections by authorities, especially the State Bank of Vietnam inspection, which requires substantial efforts in preparation and in working with inspectors from SBV. I, the Legal Team and members of various functions within have worked intensively and have brought up a good outcome.

What innovations have you made to the way your legal team works in the past year?

Innovations in legal works are not only the applicable of new technical tools but also the practical implementation of legal process and legal roles in the organisation. Legal team of HSBC Vietnam have tried to applied innovations in different ways. For examples, our Legal Function has increasingly streamlined the global solutions and documents for use in Vietnam and to effectively deliver of legal services. HSBC Legal, at global and local level, are also deploying tech-solutions for data analysis to manage the legal works and data. We also optimise the internal process and policy to provide the comprehensive legal guidance for business. Each member of the team has been encouraged to contribute ideas and provide inputs from their perspective to the team works.

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

Vietnam’s banking sector has been experiencing significant changes. With the new Law on Credit Institutions, more than 50 implementing legislations have been coming which create the new legal frameworks for banking activities. More than that, the new legislation in other sectors like E-transactions Law, Laws on Land, Real Estate Business and Data Protection regulations, etc., also require banking inhouse counsel to take considerable efforts to stay updated and have in-depth view of the regulatory changes. It is anticipated that the wave of regulatory reform will be continued in the next couple of years, thus banking lawyers should be prepared and obtain comprehensive and practical view in handling legal matters.

Nevertheless, in the special landscape of emerging domestic market and international instabilities, both Business and Legal are facing a wide range of challenges and opportunities for transformation, agility and innovations. Accordingly, in order to pursue the sustainable growth, banks must figure out the balance for of credit development and lending solutions, the rise of bank costs, demands for digital banking with the tighten governance and controls, as well as management of bad debts and emerging risks. In this context, Legal are required to keep track with the market movements and obtain new knowledge for the trend of diversification of banking products and Fintech.

Are the effects of AI on the legal world overplayed, or underplayed?

Effects of AI on the legal world, especially in banking area, may have more potentials to be explored. In fact, with the developments of AI tools, such as Chat GPT, being the game changer in many perspectives. However, in legal area which are sophisticated and the judgements of legal experts are critical, the AI journey would be distinctive. Many multinational groups have developed their own AI tools to serve the contract management and negotiation guide. It would take more time for machine learning to solve complex legal matters. Hope that AI could help lawyers work smarter, not harder in the near future.