About

After receiving her legal education at Leiden University, Maaike van Meer qualified with premier Dutch law firm NautaDutilh, where she served for over seven years, first in Amsterdam and then London. After returning to the Netherlands to manage the banking and finance practice at Amsterdam-based law firm Van Doorne, van Meer was headhunted to lead the legal services department at ING Investment Management. Her role at ING saw her first responsible for European activities, and then taking on global activities from 2009. After impressing in this role, van Meer moved overseas to ING’s Hong Kong branch in order to ‘look at the business from an Asian perspective’, staying here for a year after the 2012 divestment of the insurance and management side of the business. Having spent a stint as regional counsel for Mercer Investments, in September 2014 van Meer moved to her current role as chief legal and compliance officer for AXA Hong Kong. Throughout her in-house career, van Meer has focused on ‘managing through change, ensuring that quality and compliance are improved at every turn [and] economising large regulatory programs’. Her philosophy for in-house success is based around three core concepts. Firstly, one should appreciate the company they work for, as this is the basis for all successful work that follows. Secondly, one should recognise that ‘you are part of the whole value chain, and should look at everything that comprises it’, by getting to know business operations thoroughly. Finally, that one should ‘try to make complicated technical matters and advice simple because then you will get the buy in from the business and senior management’, and create trust in the legal team’s effectiveness as a whole. When looking back on her career highlights, van Meer is proud of her track record of ‘creating a client focus in each of [her] roles’ along with successfully ‘moving from an advisory function to a key business function’. As well as this, van Meer explains that her involvement in ‘creating regulatory advice functions helped management to see incoming risks’. On the state of the in-house legal role in Asia, van Meer explains that there should be a greater tendency towards tackling new regulations head on.