Team size: 5+

Bio

Miyu Lee is the Chief Legal and Compliance Officer of Mondu, a B2B Fintech company offering innovative payment solutions and services for businesses, and supervisory board member of Mondu’s payment company Mondu Financial Services B.V. One of the key projects of Ms. Lee in 2024 was to obtain the EMI license for Mondu from the Dutch Central Bank. Prior to joining Mondu in 2022, Ms. Lee was working for 5 years for Klarna, a Swedish bank and payment company, as Legal Director, heading the regulatory and product legal teams. Ms. Lee has a Ph.D. in Economics from Humboldt-University of Berlin and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School.

What are the main cases or transactions that you have been involved in recently?

The most recent major milestone we have achieved is to secure the European E-Money Institution (EMI) License from the Dutch Central Bank in July 2024. Our team’s work has been seminal to help accelerate Mondu’s expansion across Europe while enabling the company to evolve even faster, support more customers and launch complementary payment services like eWallets and Credit Cards. With the ability to passport our EMI license across Europe will greatly facilitate our geographical expansion. Obtaining the license from the highly respected Dutch Central Bank has been the culmination point of several years of continuous and consistent, multi-disciplinary efforts and preparatory work which required from the entire team a wide range of skills, including in-depth research, multi-party coordination and project management, all under significant time pressure.

How have you integrated technology into your legal processes, and what impact has this had on efficiency and compliance?

We make great efforts to ceaselessly automate legal processes and to integrate the usage of tools into our day-to-day work. It is part of each team member’s job description to explore possibilities to automate his or her work. The company provides the necessary resources and tools, and it is, in close cooperation with our IT engineering team, up to each team member to think of innovative and creative ways to reduce manual work. We take this ambition quite seriously, the reason being that sometimes-fast growth and scaling of the company can sometimes be quicker than the scaling of the supporting functions. This might lead to a situation that – in the absence of proper automation and integration of tools to increase efficiency – the supporting functions might have trouble keeping up with the growth. It is therefore crucial that ways of integrating technology and automating processes are explored as early as possible.

What role does the legal department play in promoting and ensuring corporate social responsibility in your organisation?

What do you see as the major legal challenges for businesses in Germany over the next five years, and how are you preparing to address them? Laws in certain areas do not properly reflect the realities of innovative businesses and the needs of startups but are still geared towards “old industries”. Startups and new industries are still having a hard time to navigate through this challenging regulatory framework. The legislator and the administrative authorities need to create a more start-up friendly and digital friendly landscape for such businesses being able to compete with businesses in other jurisdictions which right now have a clear competitive advantage. It is important for the legislator to hear the views and see the perspective of these businesses and we are participating in sharing our views in this process as well. Our ambition here is to achieve a state where German companies can be as competitive as other companies in other countries but also to make sure Germany stays an attractive place for businesses to settle down and operate.