About

Legal manager Eduard Istratescu manages the legal division of 24 lawyers and a supporting division secretary at Alpha Bank Romania, and also acts as deputy chairman of the juridical commission in the Romanian Banking Association. The Bank’s in-house legal department’s activity is carried out by four units: the litigation department – managing the litigations to which the bank is a party, wholesale department comprising the corporate and commercial desks and managing large business legal activity, the retail department – managing retail business legal activity and the general service department – managing legal activity related to regulatory, authorisations, products and services, as well as to assuring current facilities. Bogdan Nastasia is deputy manager and Valentin Calin is a senior legal counsel, both of whom joined the company 15 years ago. As Romania is an emerging economy, the legal framework is trying to keep up with rapid and sometimes unexpected transformations. There is a strong dynamic of legislative changes that implies rapid feedback from the legal department, both in terms of reconfiguring contractual clauses applicable to clients and rethinking the legal component of projects. Moreover, there is an increasing trend for the company – in the context of the legislative changes which are not tested in practice and are subject to various and contradictory interpretations – to look more and more to the legal department to try to predict areas of exposure and risk before a problem arises. Both a challenge and a trend met by legal teams in the banking industry is to focus more on productivity and on cost efficiency. This has led Alpha Bank’s legal team, as part of a company activating in the banking industry, to make a move to insource more legal work, where possible. Furthermore, the legal department looked to more lower-cost providers, increased the centralisation of its internal functions and used outside counsel law firms only for more specialised legal matters. But, as the company is a financial institution, and particularly a bank, carrying out its activity within a very regulated area of business, forced the team to work in a very exquisite way, respectively to provide an unique spin on productivity, having always in view the task of protecting and defending the company from risk and liability and complying with the most demanding requirements on regulatory and compliance. Nastasia identifies that this was challenging but also at the same time ‘interesting, under the conditions of the need to meet the stricter requirements, to remain a partner of the business team colleagues from the perspective of finalising various transactions. As it is generally accepted that in the near future the challenges will consist of new developments in technology and innovation, new service delivery models and in increasing operational and cost efficiency, our objective will be to find the right strategy in order for us to be prepared to meet them’.