Lead regional counsel - Central Europe | Visa
Yvonne Schäfer
Lead regional counsel - Central Europe | Visa
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?
The strategy of the Visa Legal team is to act as a proactive partner that safeguards Visa. This approach guides how we manage all legal aspects, and in crisis situations, it means working closely with cross-functional teams, prioritising legal risk assessments, ensuring regulatory compliance, and promoting transparent communication.
What are the main cases or transactions that you have been involved in recently?
As Lead Regional Counsel for Central Europe, I am responsible for overseeing legal matters related to Visa’s operations in this region, including Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, as well as the Nordics and Baltics. These markets are diverse, particularly in terms of electronic payment behaviors. While countries like Germany and Austria, which have traditionally been cash-heavy, are gradually shifting to digital payments, the Nordics are already well ahead in this regard.
The legal advice provided by my team is driven by the specific business needs of each market. We support partnerships with banks, financial institutions, fintechs, and merchants to enable a seamless payment experience for cardholders. A key area of our work involves ensuring the security of Visa’s payment products. For example, when payment data is stored by online merchants, it can become a target for fraud. To stay ahead of criminals, we continuously innovate our technologies. Our token technology, for instance, mitigates this risk by replacing card data with placeholders, so no visible card information is processed by merchants – tokens are meaningless to attackers. Another important component is Click to Pay, an upgrade for online card payments that ensures transactions are always tokenized, meaning cardholders never need to store or manually input card details when making online purchases.
As a global payment scheme, Visa provides essential services that support commerce across Europe. Another key aspect of my role is providing legal counsel for our relationships with important regional regulators, including the European Central Bank, based in Frankfurt.
What role does the legal department play in promoting and ensuring corporate social responsibility in your organisation?
I am extremely proud to work for a company where every leader shares the vision of creating a place where everyone is accepted everywhere. We actively promote cultural competency among Visa leaders to maximize engagement and build a strong talent acquisition pipeline. For instance, I am a mentor for female colleagues, listening to their thoughts and sharing my experiences as a female lawyer.
Our global legal team also supports Visa’s sponsorships and programs. We are particularly proud to support and empower female athletes to achieve their goals through our sponsorship of women’s football as part of our global initiatives. Another example is our She’s Next program series, where female founders have received grants to help them build and grow their businesses.
As a very active and enthusiastic part of the global legal team, we often have the opportunity to pilot new diversity and inclusion initiatives. For example, I am currently mentoring a teenager to help guide them in their job orientation, which came about through the Inhouse pro bono program in London/Frankfurt.
Lead regional counsel - central Europe | Visa
