LATAM countries your role covers: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, Peru and Venezuela

Career biography

Yana Yankova holds a postgraduate degree in Technology, Media and Telecommunications from Queen Mary University of London and more than ten years of experience in the telecommunications sector. She specialises in regulatory matters, including licensing and market access, numbering resource management and policies, voice and messaging services, fraud mitigation and infrastructure management in the cloud communications space. Yana manages the team at Bandwidth responsible for providing legal support on a wide-range of telecommunication regulatory topics, as well as managing complex compliance initiatives and advising on risk management of services in both LATAM and APAC markets. Yana is also an active contributor to the international policy making fora and currently is engaged in the International Telecommunications Union work on numbering and telecommunication service management.

Yana has a dynamic, open-minded, problem-solving personality and leads with a vision of providing stakeholder-tailored pragmatic legal advice on any regulatory matter.

Questions:

Could you please share the most significant cases or transactions in the LATAM region that you or your legal team have recently been involved in?

The telecommunications industry is going through a period of reinvigoration and change in the LATAM region and a large part of the work of myself and my team is focused on following up on the changes and advising on the practical implications of this to our business. In the broadest sense, the team advises on a wide range of issues from licensing and numbering policies to launch of new services in the cloud communications space. The team also serves as a key stakeholder in the development of internal policies and procedures to tackle the issue of increasingly low trust in telecommunications services across the world. Bringing in knowledge and experiences from regulatory developments in other regions, particularly in Europe, is key in developing best practice guidance and support to internal operational teams on complex regulatory matters.

What strategies do you employ to ensure your legal advice is effectively aligned with the unique regulatory environments and cultural nuances of different LATAM countries?

The key strategy for my team’s success is to not only provide a good foundational understanding of the law itself but also provide meaningful insights into the surrounding circumstances and the cultural environment that have led to the development. Being able to answer the question why something is happening is as important for the effectiveness of the advice provided by our team as is guiding the business through what the regulatory changes themselves are. This can be shared across multiple LATAM countries or unique to each one but has become the cornerstone of our strategy whether it is advising on a law change, or an industry practice or providing context of the economic and geopolitical situation.

What specific challenges have you encountered when managing legal issues related to Latin American markets from a European perspective, and how has your team addressed these challenges?

As opposed to European telecommunication regulation that follows a general authorisation regime that provides lower barriers to market access, the majority of LATAM frameworks still pose a regulatory challenge for entry. While regulators in the region are looking at ways to operate more efficiently, licenses and service registration schemes remain a complex and often time consuming affair for international businesses operating within LATAM to navigate through. The team is an expert in unpacking the complexities and digesting them to understandable requirements for the business but the one major win has been our ability to advise on the practical and realistic timelines in each country. Knowing the overall circumstances of each LATAM market has been the main catalyst to enable the business to plan ahead accordingly.