About

Carlos Aldana, legal director of capital markets and corporate finance, manages the in-house legal subdivision at Grupo Bancolombia. The team is composed of 18 lawyers and three interns, who support the team efforts on a day-to-day basis, which is structured in four different sub-teams, namely, M&A and capital markets, structured finance, wealth and asset management, and the proprietary trading desk legal team. In that sense, the division provides legal services to each of the following business lines of the bank and or its subsidiaries. The investment bank, all trading desks, the asset management team, the wealth management team, and the structured finance and corporate loans teams. Given the broad array of topics and the demanding dynamic of each of the business lines, the key individuals on the team are the leaders of each of the sub-teams. They are the individuals that help identify and exploit potential synergies and better service opportunities, but additionally spend their hours developing legal strategies to increase their respective business line’s earning potential. In line with the above, Adriana Bravo, Maria Camila Silva, Veronica Ramirez, and Juan Manuel Uribe, have shown their leadership capabilities, and flawless legal judgement in leading four challenging business areas. In the last two years, there have been three fundamental changes that have transformed the team. The first one is the reorganisation of the legal support to the trading desk, including the proprietary trading desk, to the capital markets and corporate finance legal team. Aldana identifies that ‘this merger created new synergies and gave the team insight to a new way of servicing our internal clients, which led to faster response times, and challenged the team in legal interpretations that served a variety of clients from different perspectives’. The second structural change was that the team acquired regional responsibilities. This implied that each team member had transactions in each of the jurisdictions in which Grupo Bancolombia has investments, but additionally they had to think more broadly in their day-to-day, in order to serve not only their internal clients within the different organisations, but create policies and structures that went beyond borders. Finally, the third change, was the push towards digitalisation. Aldana continues: ‘During the last two years, the lawyers of this team took it upon themselves to search for ways to innovate and digitalise some of their operations, and knowledge sharing in their day-to-day. This has led the team to create new products for our clients, such as an automated chatbot with handles questions on the legal feasibility of certain trades with some of our counterparties; as well as implementing a new platform through which the lawyers of the teams are continuously sharing knowledge and improving on it, even beyond the division of typical team lines’. Over the last two years the team has played an essential part in some of the bank’s major capital markets transactions. This includes the financing of the Ruta del Cacao, one of the biggest fourth generation roads in Colombia, in an industry award winning transaction, involving COL$1.68tn. Additionally, the team worked on the restructuring of debt for Ingenio Magdalena. In a restructuring of a loan for US$405m, the in-house lawyers participated in the team that led the operation in the role of the structuring leader, and as lender. This operation involved business counterparties in several institutions, in different countries, and thus required a legal team that managed different sets of regulations, and still managed to close the deal in accordance with the expectations of the client and of the different financial institutions. The team’s capital markets sub division worked on a major fixed-income issuance. In this transaction, Terpel issued notes for COL$1.1tn, the largest fixed income operation in the country. The legal team handled all the issues in order to guarantee an excellent execution of the transaction.