About

Sabine is in the position of managing director for FMS Wertmanagement AÖR (FMS WM) in Munich. She covers the role of the general counsel, head of legal and group compliance. FMS WM was founded 2010 as the federally owned winding-up institution for the Hypo Real Estate AG (HRE) which was taken over by the German State in order to counteract the consequences of the Lehman breakdown. FMS WM currently records approximately EUR €60bn assets under management in 60 countries, EUR €120 bn of total assets. Sabine joined the company in October 2020 in the 20th year of her own career, now leading a team of 13 employees across three locations: Munich, Dublin and New York.

Thanks to her in-depth expertise in European Prudential Regulation and banking and finance laws coming with an ability to think and act out of the box with results previously judged as highly unlikely, Sabine throughout her whole career was able to drive the regulatory strategy in her respective position to success. Within the FMS WM she reached the realisation of (…) savings in the overall winddown plan as well as the comprehensive exemption of FMS WM from European banking regulatory requirements by qualifying the FMS WM as belonging to the public debt management. In her previous role at Fidor Bank AG in Munich, which was one of the first Neobanks-FinTech banks in Germany, she built and managed relationships with crypto currency exchanges, at that time being the first and only head of legal and group compliance across Germany supporting crypto currency business. In her previous role at the Hamburger Sparkasse, she managed to get a very unexpected verdict by the German High Court of Justice, ending the previous Kick Back jurisdiction in Germany, which had impacted the banking industry for years.

Sabine is a very strategically thinking leader. Some of her team’s recent achievements include the sale of Depfa Bank to BAWAG; legal support to a comprehensive IT transition of all IT systems, hardware and software to new service providers and the legal support of major public procurement proceedings.

Sabine has 22 years of experience in the banking sector, most of the time as a key point of contact for regulators such as BaFin, ECB, and FIU; she has also been very active in publications and committees. It is worth mentioning her ‘Cybercrime Phenomena in the Digitalised Environment’ presentation at the annual conference of the Financial Intelligence Unit in Cologne; and the publication ‘FinTechs und die bankaufsichtsrechtlichen Lizenzpflichten’ in the Journal of Banking and Capital Markets Law by Beck Publishers.

Since 2012 up to these days, Sabine has been part of the Professional Association of Compliance Managers (BvdCM), of which she became an associate member of the chairman’s committee in 2015.