What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Last year we focused a lot of our efforts on fundraising, both in equity and debt. We closed three series of equity investment rounds led by prominent venture investors, such as Union Square Ventures, Greycroft Capital, GIC and SoftBank. Additionally, we completed our second structured debt facility for our Colombian operation with Goldman Sachs. All these transactions – which put us in a strong position today – obviously required heavy involvement from the legal team.
2021 was also the year we launched our Brazilian operation and exponentially grew our Colombian business. We supported this growth by establishing our presence in Brazil and negotiating the appropriate partnerships, setting up a more robust compliance function and supporting our product roadmap: maintaining our original point of sale loan in Colombia; launching our zero interest BNPL product in Colombia and Brazil, and a BNPN solution in Brazil.

What will be the main focus for the company in the next 12 months and how do you intend to assist with this?

In the past few weeks, the macroeconomic environment for technology companies changed drastically, as seen during the 2000 Internet Bubble and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. This means that the bar for success has risen meaningfully. On the other hand, we are as optimistic as we have ever been about our business and geographies. We have a unique opportunity to become one of the few companies that can fulfil its stated mission – making all commerce digital. We are convinced that the combination of payments and buy now pay later will be incredibly powerful in Latin America. And we also believe that we have an excellent product-market fit.
With this context in mind, we will focus our efforts on ensuring that Addi fulfils its mission in a sustainable and compliant way. We will therefore support and enable different initiatives to accelerate revenue creation and our funding and leverage agenda. We will also ensure we deliver winning, innovative, and compliant products in the geographies we operate in, starting with Brazil.

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or general counsel, what would it be and why?

Strengthen your non-legal abilities. You need solid legal sense to be a successful in-house counsel. However, it is no longer enough to “just” be a lawyer. Learn other skills (for instance, design, programming, some data literacy, and at least some basic finance understanding) and bring a problem-solving and multidisciplinary mindset to the table. Critically, develop your soft skills. As a lawyer, you must be able to influence other people, which requires the ability to connect at a personal level and convince with good arguments, empathy, creativity, and common sense.