About

Can you briefly explain how the legal team is structured, highlighting key individuals and their role within the department?

Mastercard’s Law, Franchise and Integrity (LFI) team is structured in four parts. David Barajas Herrera is the head of Mastercard’s LFI team for Mexico and Central America and he coordinates the team efforts within the region as follows:

Guillermo Maniaux (Director), Ramiro Domínguez and David Soto are in charge of Customer Compliance and Fraud;

Salvador Salgado (Director) is in charge of Franchise Management;

Diana Zamora is in charge of Public Policy;

Last but not least, Rocio Murillo and Alejandro Paz handling legal matters within the region.

What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has been involved with in the last two years?

The most relevant cases are related with a continuous regulatory trend within the region. Mastercard has faced several challenges in order to adapt to the current environment such as being regulated on our core activity, constant supervision and detailed scrutiny, and some other new challenges due to political environment and new technology trends (cryptocurrencies or blockchain type of payments).

What recent political, economic or regulatory changes in Central America have impacted your company and the team the most?

Mexico’s new government agenda has been very relevant to promoting financial inclusion and that gives us the opportunity to participate in the market.

The issuance of regulation towards Fintech environment, digital money and so on, has been very relevant to the payment system within the region because it enables new players that we have to address.

Active participation around the conversations on interchange in Costa Rica.

Our goal is to make the transaction more secure and seamless in order to improve customer experience.

What is missing from the ‘legal tech’ products currently in the market?

A holistic tool and easy to use application in order to perform our activities without so many passwords, workflows and different interfaces.

One single interface for information feed, reports, data warehouse and approval management.

How does the team ensure it remains a true business partner to the company?

Having talks and direct interaction with our clients.

Listening to what the market needs.

Improving ourselves as a tech company.

Measuring our goals and achievements.

Providing and participating in different topic trainings beyond legal.

Can you describe some of the challenges your team faces by working for an American multinational financial services corporation in Central America?

The main challenge is to adapt a United States-centric vision into a very localised culture with specific needs, regulatory political and economic environment and characteristics for every market. We consider ourselves a local company bringing international expertise into every one of our markets. That is the real challenge.

Focus on… TEAMWORK

As a team we have failed as much as we have succeeded, and from that we have learned and reached this point. They say that something that is not measured cannot be improved. Having a connected and committed teamwork allows us to be more efficient. I have the honour to lead a great team that works harder every day to give our best effort for the region and for the company, and not just because we have lots of work to do but mainly because we are always trying to give the best version of ourselves in everything we do. I do believe that the success from the team starts by: Interacting with each other. Even when this seems to be very basic, it is not always a granted. Daily workload and routines are the worst enemies of effective communication. Offer an holistic approach. Legal department should focus on enabling the business and business goes beyond a merely legal opinion. Promote your work. Supporting areas such as legal departments are very bad at promoting their work. We cannot miss any opportunity to promote what we are doing because that also imply an effective training for your internal customers. Having different backgrounds with very talented people allows us to provide supported and holistic solutions. We have grown through the interaction we have with our internal and external clients because they know they can count on us and we are giving them added value to their work, this is my main job and purpose within this journey. I want to create a legal department that is appreciated by the company rather than being a ‘necessary pain’. Every day, I spend some time during my commute thinking how we can improve what we have already in place.