About

Responsible for the management of all legal aspects of M&A transactions for BNP Paribas Group entities and business lines around the world, the BNP Paribas M&A legal team is an elite component of the bank’s legal function. Louis-Philippe Vasconcelos heads the six-person team and describes the team’s prevailing values as ‘service excellence, independence and proximity, cost effectiveness and agile working’, which go ‘right to the core of the organisation’. The main work of the team is concerned with sale and purchase agreements for transfer of equity or assets, shareholders agreements, distribution agreements, technical agreements contractual framework definitions and outlining and managing the roles and responsibilities of the other legal teams involved – highly complex work, especially when considering the scale of projects that BNP Paribas group companies work on. Just some of these include the acquisitions of Raffeisen Polska, Compte Nickel, Gambit and the fleet leasing activity of General Electric as well as a number of strategic partnerships. It gas also overseen the IPOs of SBI Life in India and First Hawaiian Bank in the United States. The team is already gearing up for the technological revolution in in-house legal affairs. ‘Given the digitalisation of the function, the in-house legal role shall evolve so as to focus in added value tasks and to try to be as close as possible to the decision making process of the top management of the companies’, Vasconcelos says.