About

The NETS Group is a leading payments services group, presenting solutions across the payments value chain and fastening Singapore’s progress to become a best-in-class, electronics payment hub. The team is led by head of legal and secretariat Phyllis Yan, who heads the legal team dealing with group level work and the legal and secretariat work of NETS and four of its subsidiaries across Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong and China. The department comprises of four lawyers and one non-lawyer. Prior to Yan joining in 2011, there was no legal team after the departure of the sole legal counsel. This was just before the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) designated NETS’ EFTPOS system, Singapore’s national debit scheme, under the Payments Systems (Oversight) Act. As a result of this designation, NETS came under MAS’ direct oversight. The NETS legal teams’ role therefore expanded to accommodate this major change. A number of key initiatives to transform the legal, corporate secretariat and compliance function were rolled out to take into account NETS’ presence as a highly regulated, but yet nimble player in payment services. These include setting up, formalising and growing the entire legal, compliance and corporate secretariat function from scratch. In the later part of 2016 to mid-2017 NETS acquired two OCBC subsidiaries, BCS and BCSIS. The three part time lawyers in both the acquired companies now come under Yan’s lead, and is helping to integrate this expanded team both at group and company level. Although the structure of the team has been ever-changing, it has been considered a learning curve by the legal team. As Yan says, ‘the only constant is change. This one sentence is the most relevant to our team because of the level of changes faced by NETS over the past six years. This is due in part to the overall dynamism of the payment services industry due to the direction set by Singapore’s Prime Minister’.