About

Rafael Bilbao Deramond’s first spell at the Chilean arm of Scotiabank, the Canadian financial services company, came between 2007 and 2010 when he was initially providing advice to the corporate banking and the money table divisions. Over time he took charge of the corporate banking legal team, to cover the entire business, except for labour and mortgages. At the beginning of that period he helped expand Scotiabank’s presence in the country when working on its acquisition of Banco del Desarrollo and incorporating its new business segments. ‘I was actively involved in all the stages of the purchase, and throughout the entire integration process, which took two years’, Bilbao says. He also highlights that the deal stood him in good stead for Scotiabank Chile’s purchase of Royal Bank of Scotland’s wholesale banking operations in 2010. A year later he accepted an invitation to join the Cabinet of the Minister of the Interior of the Chilean Government for two years, as an advisor in all kinds of matters including drawing up bills of law. After this period and a one year spell as partner of a law firm, Bilbao re-joined Scotiabank Chile in 2014. When re-hired by Scotiabank, which today has approximately 3,800 employees and almost 140 branches in Chile, he took the position of senior counsel and is now in charge of a team of 36 people. Bilbao says his main challenges have been ‘the renewal of teams, the generation of effective plans for succession and the modernisation of the legal services of the senior counsel’s office, which has required a change in the model’. He has overcome this in part by digitalising external legal services nationwide, eliminating the use of physical documents and implementing software. ‘This has enabled us to centralise, in Santiago, a significant part of the legal services previously performed in regions’, he says. ‘This has generated significant effects in terms of shorter response times, enhanced service standards, reduction in the size of physical spaces required for filing, reductions in use of paper and lower management and external legal services costs’. As part of the bank’s strategy to increase its Latin American market share, Bilbao has overseen a number of large-scale transactions – for example, the purchase of the Cencosud Credit Card in 2015 and the acquisition of the portfolio of Banco Paris in 2017. He has already shown how to address new regulations as they are announced, and before their enactment, such as the new bankruptcy law, the labour reform and the recently announced reform of the General Banking Law. Before originally joining Scotiabank in 2007, Bilbao was at the law firm Alvarez Hinzpeter Jana (currently known as Bofill Mir Alvarez Jana) from 2003. He joined ABN AMRO Bank in 1997 after completing his degree, where over a period of six years he acquired a comprehensive understanding of banking activities, and also learnt the corporate governance activities required in a bank. He has a postgraduate diploma in Economics and Finance for Lawyers from the University of Chile, a diploma in Corporate Finance from Universidad Finis Terrae, and an LLM in Economics and Finance from Universidad Gabriela Mistral.