About

Louangela Bianchini C. Colquhoun started her career as a professor at a federal public university teaching public law and other subjects. During this time she was invited to participate in the largest bidding process for telecommunications in Brazil representing a local telecom company located in the interior of Minas Gerais. During the management of the bidding process papers, she had contact with the foreign shareholders of this company, and started to interact with M&A deals, revising shareholder agreements, entering into investment agreements and purchasing or selling companies. The bidding process was a long and time consuming project and she ended up interacting with law firms based in São Paulo. After the bidding process was concluded, Meyer, Sendacz e Opice Advogados (MMSO) invited her to join the company as an associate. She worked at MMSO for almost five years, focusing first on telecom matters and later on banking. During the period Colquhoun was working at MMSO, she was seconded to Citibank and later joined them to run the in-house department responsible for corporate and internal M&A. During her nine-year period at Citibank, Colquhoun managed commercial banking, private banking, treasury and corporate matters, not including the litigation department. Afterwards she moved to a family-owned bank named Banco Safra where she began running commercial banking and later on moved to litigation management. In 2016, Cielo, the largest acquiring company in Brazil, was preparing for a new stage of regulatory framework and needed a lawyer with banking experience to go through the transition from a non-regulated activity to a regulated activity. Colquhoun joined Cielo in August 2016 and remains general counsel. She says that this year has been very challenging because the company is focusing on reorganising the litigation department, establishing business intelligence measurements, cross checking legal data with other internal databases to determine profiles and root causes for lawsuits, reviewing internal procedures and determining action plans for each root cause. Colquhoun has also been busy with prominent M&A deals including a deal to acquire Stelo, the incorporation of a new public receivables investment fund and the creation of a new subsidiary company, Cateno- Gestão de Contas de Pagamento, via an association between Cielo and BB Elo Cartões Participações, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Banco do Brasil. Colquhoun says, ‘working in the largest acquiring company in Brazil offers me challenges every single day and this is what I am passionate about: helping people to find different manners to do business, enabling others to enter the banking system as customers and small retailers and preparing the future in the payment industry’.