Team size: 26 

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?  

The legal unit has been split up into three teams, each team handling requests for legal advice from specific departments and divisions within the bank.  A bespoke legal advisors’ system was engineered (through the use of internal IT resources, therefore at a reasonable cost) in order to receive such requests and allocate them automatically to the relevant team depending on their origin, for example, requests from treasury department are automatically diverted to team C, whereas requests from the corporate banking division are diverted to team A.  This has improved efficiency tremendously in that requests are handled by those who have the necessary experience, time is not wasted in deciding who is to handle each request and through the introduction of categorisation of queries (by urgency level) and time frames for responding through the system, due and prompt attention is paid ensuring responses are submitted in a timely manner. 

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?  

The team has been involved in the sale of non-performing loans, Bank of Cyprus being the first local bank to achieve such a trade.  This was a novel experience and has opened the door for a number of trades to follow, both by the bank itself as well as by other local banks.  The work involved complicated documentation, negotiations with the counterparties and court processes for the approval of the proposed schemes in order to implement the sale. 

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? Are you likely to reconsider what firms you work with based on this?   

This is very important to us.  As it is, we choose our external counsel very carefully on the basis of their reputation in the market, their ESG values and cultural compatibility with the Bank, their pricing and billing transparency, their international exposure and how current they are with technology and digitalisation (not only as an important part of their own efficiency, but also in order for them to be able to advise and assist the Bank in implementing its own digitalisation strategy), and of course their responsiveness and availability practice given that the bank usually works within set and often urgent timeframes.