Loukia Kanarini joined the rapidly growing business of online trading company IronFX Group in 2012, two years after the company was founded. Initially serving as legal advisor and subsequently promoted to legal counsel, Kanarini now holds the positions of head of legal and compliance as well as being the company’s general counsel. In this capacity she has been developing her role and gaining more responsibility after playing a leading role in a number of key company milestones within relatively short space of time. In her first two years at IronFX, Kanarini spearheaded the global expansion of the Group by obtaining regulatory licences in the UK, Australia, South Africa, Cyprus, Dubai and Russia and in the process creating ‘one of the most all-encompassing regulatory frameworks in the online trading industry’ to-date.

With the responsibility of leading the corporate transactions legal team, Kanarini worked on the prospective IPO of the IronFX Group on the NYSE, leading the legal process including liaison with the IPO syndicate counsels and the Securities and Exchange Commission. She additionally led corporate finance legal work on a variety of transactions including negotiations and transactions with Apollo Management, Cohen & Co, Nukkleus, Voltaire Capital and Zeus Capital. As leader of the litigation legal team, she has also helped achieve seminal judgments in favour of the company in the high courts of Munich, Hungary and Cyprus and obtained a Queen’s Counsel (QC) opinion for the company as to fairness of terms and conditions and compliance with the EU’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID).

Kanarini has been instrumental in restructuring the IronFX Group’s compliance function with a team of in-house lawyers and compliance officers reporting to the board of directors. Other internal improvements she has facilitated include implementing weekly workflow-based and target-based legal project origination and delivery as well as segmented workflows between legal and compliance functions, allocating specialist locally-based personnel for the latter. Prior to her current role, Kanarini was a lawyer at leading Cypriot law firm Andreas Neocleous & Co LLC. She was admitted to the Cyprus Bar in 2011 and is a holder of the CySEC Advanced Certification. Kanarini is a graduate of the University of Leicester, having obtained both LLB and LLM degrees in 2009 and 2010 respectively.