About

Selin Tiftikci Tuncer, senior vice president for legal services and compliance, established BKM’s legal department in 2012 from scratch and helped BKM’s top executives build a sound legal and compliance strategy for everyday business and new business opportunities involving cutting-edge technologies. BKM’s legal and compliance department currently includes Yaşar K. Canpolat and Burcu Ҫavdar, who both report directly to Tuncer. BKM was established in 1990 as a business-to-business company to provide processing services to banks for card payment transactions, but the need for a legal department did not arise until 2012. According to Tuncer, ‘such need was due to recent regulatory developments affecting the payment industry in Turkey. Over the years, the payment industry became more and more regulated and, in parallel, BKM has expanded variety of its services and launched services reaching end consumers’. These changes required BKM’s legal team to assume a greater and varied workload over time. As a result, in the last couple of years, headcount and the budget of the department have kept increasing substantially. BKM launched BKMexpress in 2012 as the first digital wallet in Turkey. Tuncer explains: ‘The digital wallet project was first of its kind in many aspects, it features a very specific type of secure online payments and it facilitates face-to-face digital payments at certain select retailers’. Taking care of legal matters involving BKMexpress and its continuously innovative new features is one of the team’s most significant projects. Another significant project was launching “Troy”, the national payment card scheme of Turkey. Between 2015 and 2017 the BKM legal team has conducted a series of projects around the Troy scheme, involving multiple license applications with the relevant banking regulators in Turkey, negotiation of key processing and license agreements with one of the biggest international card schemes, “Discover”, and helping the creation of the core rules of the payment scheme. Tuncer identifies that the ‘team is especially proud of being business-oriented and supportive of the many innovations endorsed within the company. We like to position ourselves as a “coach” helping our business teams grow by making informed decisions on taking legal risks. Working on fintech as a legal professional is a hard task, most of the time the business model is uncertain, regulations are unclear and no one has ever tried it before. So imagination and innovative approach play a key role when giving legal advice for fintech projects. This is why we try to outsource the “mainstream” and make time for the “unusual”’.