About

Folksam is a large Swedish insurance company with a wide range of products requiring a variety of legal area coverage. Group legal counsel Stina Åkerlind joined Folksam after developing her career via decades of experience within financial in-house legal teams – including at Aberdeen Asset Management and Carnegie – as well as in a district court and governmental financial regulatory body, in addition to private practice experience. As it operates within complex financial markets, Folksam’s business is heavily regulated, and Åkerlind is heavily involved in mitigating the challenges this regulation poses, utilising her background to ensure the Folksam business is compliant, while at the same time making sure that her advice is business oriented. Regarding her approach, she says: ‘I have always strived to find a balance in my way of providing the business with legal advice, where pragmatism, common sense, focus on legal risk and communication play important parts. What has always driven me is the contribution to the business; to make the business appreciate the value of the in-house lawyers, and that they can actually improve the business and contribute to happier clients’. During her time at Folksam, Åkerlind has taken the initiative to implement in-house legal training on various topics, with the purpose of working more proactively and increasing the pool of legal knowledge across the company. In her previous role at Aberdeen Asset Management, Åkerlind changed the way the company worked with its external counsel, mainly in Sweden but also in Denmark, by arranging beauty parades and making continuous evaluations to make sure that the business was achieving the best value for money. She also set up a Nordic legal forum where regulatory changes were discussed, in order to ensure compliance with existing and emerging regulation in the relevant markets. Since the start of her career in the 1990’s, the financial industry has undergone massive change, particularly since the 2007 global financial crisis. Throughout these changes, Stina Åkerlind has always stayed up to date and been a leader in terms of education of her teams ensuring continued excellence in dealing with important and complex legal and compliance challenges.