About

Julia Lannerheim started her career in private practice as a lawyer at the Vinge law firm, working on corporate law and dispute resolution issues focusing on international and commercial disputes. In 2011 she moved in-house joining SEB, a leading Nordic corporate bank, involved in corporate credit and payment instructions and its regulation and corporate governance. In May 2014, Lannerheim was involved in the major sale of the SEB subsidiary Euroline, a card acquiring company, to Nordic Capital, which then became known as Bambora, an innvovative Swedish fintech company. Lannerheim then moved to Bambora as its head of legal to lead efforts to expand the company through strategic acquisitions across the globe. In May 2018, Lannerheim joined Arvato Financial Solutions, as risk and compliance office for B2C finance and collection in the Nordic region. This covers the full value chain from payment to collection of outstanding invoices with a growth agenda and several different licences to comply with in Europe. Lannerheim says that the divestment of Euroline from SEB to Nordic Capital in 2014 was a great experience for her as a legal expert in a transaction, saying ‘during this transaction, it became obvious to me – given the questions I received during my face-to-face-session with potential buyers – that qualifications for a general counsel can and should extend beyond legal expertise to broader business and industry knowledge, especially if you work in a company which grows through acquisition’. To this effect, Lannerheim identifies that very few fintech companies have been successful in global expansion, but many dream of borderless innovation. The acquisition of Beanstream Internet Commerce in 2015, for example, was a result of Bambora’s ambition to expand through acquisitions in the North American market. She highlights that, ‘this was exciting as we entered a market that was unfamiliar for me, especially from a legal and regulatory perspective, and that I now for the first time worked in a truly global payment environment’. On compliance and GDPR, she says that being compliant is a team effort of an entire organisation and there is no “one size fits all” approach to a GDPR project, and having an organisation that is not fully committed to being compliant is not an option. During autumn and spring 2018, she successfully ran a project to ensure that appropriate security measures were in place in May 2018. During the last ten years, Lannerheim has had the opportunity to review, through due diligence, many payment-services companies across the globe with different licence requirements and a considerable range of product categories. She has also had the opportunity to work with them through partnerships. About her experiences, she explains that: ‘Starting out at a law firm, working at a leading commercial bank, in a private equity-backed start-up, and now in a pan-European leader in financial solutions, I have amassed an experience and expertise in a range of regulatory and legal issues facing the fintech and payments industries that very few lawyers have’.