Team size: 45

Can you give an idea of the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Having contributed significantly to bringing the Nets Group to the top of the European payments industry, not least by being part of the leadership of consummating the merger with Nexi Group, the legal and compliance team has over the past year, delivered an outstanding performance.

The team operated at a consistently extraordinary high level of quality when the company and the regulated payments industry went through a period of immense change. This put new and significantly more demanding requests on the team and required us to find new ways of working to ensure that it protected the business from risks, significantly contributed to the growth of the company and supported it to meet its strategic targets.

Other notable achievements include:

Further pan-European integration of the team and cross boarder collaboration amongst the nine different nationalities represented in the team

Bringing Nordic payments products into DACH

Simplifying the group structure

Completing several strategic M&A deals

Successfully handling several complex regulatory audits

Completing outsourcing assessment of over 800 supplier agreements

Ukraine war crisis management task force

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

We are certain that AI in the likes of ChatGPT or Google’s Bard – once in a more commercial advanced state – will prove to be significant contributors to the legal and compliance world. The ability of AI to comprehend and harvest knowledge from several million documents and produce a result, will be far more efficient than what one lawyer or a team of lawyers can do.

This will never replace the need for human beings to be part of a legal and compliance team to ensure that interpretation of AI is applicable in the real commercial world; the need for extra quality assurance in the final product; or the need to engage with the business to understand the real problem. Instead, it will make many processes significantly more efficient and less time consuming. Just imagine the ability of ChatGPT to work through all relevant legislation to write a first draft of a policy – this can be done in milliseconds and then the team can take over to ensure quality and applicability, consequently, freeing up resources to focus on other strategic tasks.

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or general counsel, what would it be and why?

Never stop being curious about the business – understanding the business is the only right way to provide extraordinary quality in your advice to the as in-house counsel. This is also one way we deliver beyond what external counsels can. Showing curiosity will also help you build a much-needed network with your colleagues.

The unusual business environment created by the pandemic has been swiftly followed by the Ukraine crisis, and attendant supply chain costs rising and rising inflation. Are you now putting more emphasis on preparing for the unforeseen and, if so, what does this entail?

In the current uncertain and ever-changing environment we are currently navigating, new skills are required. As a legal and compliance team, we can view ourselves a bit as the helmsman whose primary goal is to navigate a boat out of troubled waters to a safe island, where the business can continue to thrive.

This requires more creative thinking and more emotional resilience to keep dealing with new types of issues and requirements being thrown at you. This means that we need to help our team members develop these skills as well as specifically recruit for these skills. To allow time for more creative functions, it is essential to ensure underlying operations are set up as stable and efficiently as possible to allow time and space for more demanding tasks.