Team size: Ten

Key team members: Eric Lai (group deputy general counsel)and Vivian Cheng (head of legal and compliance)

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

The group legal team worked on bolttech’s Series A financing which raised over $210m at a $1bn pre-money valuation, making it the largest Series A round for an insurtech. This was followed by bolttech’s Series B financing round more recently, raising an additional $196m at an up-round valuation, against current capital markets backdrop. The Series B financing welcomed, among others, MetLife, Khazanah Nasional Berhad and Tokio Marine Group as new shareholders.

The group legal team also worked on a number of joint ventures and M&A transactions in the past year. Bolttech acquired AVA Insurance Brokers and AVA Insurance Agency, a Singapore-based insurance intermediary and specialist broker, and PT Axle Asia, an established insurance broker in Indonesia. The team also helped launch Vyrd, a new insurance company serving homeowners in Florida. Vyrd is a joint venture between SiriusPoint, a Bermuda-based specialty insurer and reinsurer, and bolttech.

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?

Bolttech is a young start-up company with business spanning across over 30+ markets around the globe.

To ensure the legal team across the geographies can work collaboratively, we developed and utilised agile collaborative tools such as cloud-based kanban-style applications and SharePoint to manage our contract lifecycle process. The system is cost effective, and encouraged collaboration and transparency across the group. It significantly reduced the amount of time and effort the legal team needs to manually locate information about contracts.

Can you sum up the team culture in one sentence?

We empower team members to make decisions and make ourselves accountable to each other. We communicate in a way that is transparent and see every task as part of the whole.

In a company as young as bolttech, we do not have the privilege of having pre-established policies, procedures and thinking. The company has been growing at phenomenal pace and each team member must take leadership roles and work collaboratively with each other in order for us to support the business’s growth.