About

Alberto Vergara, assistant general counsel and director of litigation of Scotiabank Chile, began his current position in 2016 at BBVA Chile and has stayed in the role after Scotiabank purchased the company in 2018. He joined with a great deal of private practice and in-house legal experience within Baker McKenzie and the Chilean government’s Ministry of Education, and he has asloserved as part of the legal advisory team to President Piñera as part of the Ministry General Secretariat of the Presidency. Since the Scotiabank takeover, an important internal change has been the coordination between the litigation and regulation practices. He identifies that the change has allowed the wider company to use the ligation as a tool to prevent future contingencies ans to have a more proactive and less reactive approach to the new or coming regulations. Other than the Scotiabank takeover, Vergara’s most important achievements have been the antitrust litigation between several private banks and BancoEstado, the litigation against Corfo derived from the Inverlink case, the long lasting arbitration between the companies owned by Francisco Javier Errazuriz and BBVA Chile, now Scotiabank Chile, and the arbitration against its insurance company as a consequence of the flood suffered at its corporate tower in 2016, among others. Vergara highlights trends within the in-house market in Chile, explaining ‘the current challenge that fintechs, new technologies, social networks and new regulations imply for financial institutions, especially banks, although daunting at some times, are shaping in-house lawyers of international banks, to play a new and key role inside our organisations. [We’re] required to have the capacity and willingness to constantly adapt ourselves to new situations and scenarios’.