How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

We are facing unprecedent worldwide events and threats with significant acceleration, high complexity driven by strategic business globalisation and sourcing, (new) technologies enabling digital delivery under new or more restrictive regulatory landscape in banking industry.

Legal strategies provide a backbone for business compliance and resilience enabling Senior Management and business owners to navigate through legal complexity from governance, projects, design and implementation, including sustainability objectives as part of our DNA. The Legal Team is providing support and advise as part of (re)design of global and local internal control documents, as transposing obligations, and regulatory requirements, including local specific regulation, into policies and standards, with identified risks and mitigation measures embedding risk management under day-by-day activities with high standard business objectives and pressure on costs and operations efficiency, optimisation and automation. Legal mission and vision are enabling proactive and flexible business strategies, with an eye on existing and future emerging risks, like consumption of machine learning/ AI, continuously new/ more aggressive security threats/attacks, military conflict and climate risks putting under risk the physical security of employees, customers, assets, data, supply chain.

During business disruptions and crisis events, Legal is supporting informed, prompt, and effective decisions of Response Structures on identifying and applying measures to minimise the impact and resume (critical and important) Services/ functions. As Head of Legal, I’m part of Crisis Management Team with valuable advice and input on identifying relevant and plausible scenarios and pre-defined response, along with managing real-life significant business disruption leading to crisis requiring entity coordination, fast decisions on safety and security and resuming (critical and important) Services, as of Operational resilience criticality and impact tolerance levels.

The Legal support and advise is contributing and enhancing the business capabilities, skills, and (risk) behavior to manage the Operational Resilience processes, by fostering Operational Resilience elements – people, facilities, data, technologies, supply chain, including communication and regulatory immediate incidents reporting, and Business Continuity preparedness to cope with business disruption impacting the customers, the market, and compliancy with regulatory requirements, enabling the organisational resilience maturity journey.

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments?

GenAI is undoubtedly the queen of emerging technologies and will also transform how we operate in the legal profession, especially in banking. Our legal team has not yet adopted AI-powered tools and when we will, our legal professionals will always need to guide AI in the right direction. It will positively impact the way we manage tasks -contract review for identification of risks and inconsistencies, handling the developments in legislation and case law for regulatory compliance, searching through large databases for due diligence, etc. It will allow us to focus on higher-value work that requires strategic thinking and on prevention of risks. We’re excited, but we remember that we’re being under scrutiny and must maintain society’s trust.

ING has been (prudently) investigating how we can take advantage of GenAI in other specific areas as customer contact centres (chatbots, transcript analysis etc.), software engineering (writing code), content creation, know your customer etc and these experiments have shown the significant value in integrating GenAI into our processes.

Data analytics has also the potential to be another game-changer for legal teams, helping to identify trends and risks and improve decision-making, but we still have a long way to go before it’s widely adopted.

To stay updated, we engage with industry leaders in AI&analytics and we are following the law firms that have already implemented AI, attending their presentations and staying updated on their work.