Team size: 20

Are there any recent political, economic or regulatory changes that have impacted you or your team?

Firstly, an important development was the Covid-19 pandemic, because my team is responsible for the corporate banking legal support within the bank which covers major loans to medium and large corporations. Due to the pandemic, there were many EU and supranational initiatives, as well as government initiatives for providing comfort and loans which are either funded or guaranteed by the Hellenic Republic, the EIB among others.

We experienced an increased workload while working to support granting these loans to corporations in need. There was also an introduction of many new products, happening at the same time, which originated from initiatives from the EU, the Greek government and Greek banks. The department assisted the bank’s initiatives to introduce measures to make life easier for the companies like extension of deadlines, granting support for interest rate payments and more.

In addition, we were locked down for several periods of time and this was challenging in the context of lending as it was difficult to liaise with agencies such as the mortgage registries and land registries who were not working in their usual manner.

Does your team use any legal technology?

That is a very interesting question, because I know this is gaining lots of pace in several legal departments recently, especially concerning contract drafting and reviewing, but because of the type of work we do, like supporting the bank with large corporates, most agreements are tailor-made. So, though technology can readily help with contract drafting of similar contracts, it is not entirely useful for us. Sometimes, even these seemingly repetitive tasks with corporate clients require negotiations so to be honest, since our division needs to be very specific with contract drafting and reviewing, it can be quite difficult for technology to help or ease our respective everyday tasks. However, technology could help our department with processing and monitoring legal requests that we receive from our internal clients as we must work with several units.

Has your company been impacted by new phenomena like FinTech and blockchain and how does your legal team assist the company trying to stay competitive against them?

Yes, of course, digital transformation is the top priority of the bank, and we have big plans that we intend to completely achieve by 2030. My specific department assists to the extent that we are competent, because as mentioned before, our basic job is to legally support corporate banking. So, we are engaged with the transformative plan to embrace technology, but it is not our 100% competence within the Bank. We will certainly be of more support in understanding the legal safety of adopting new technologies, as these are the difficult issues from a legal perspective with implementing new systems and technologies to remain competitive.