Team size: 18

Key team members: Jonathan Phillips, Nicolas Gonzalez, Susan Wong, Graham Wong, Benjamin Toh and Michael Brock

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

In the financing space, Natixis legal assisted business teams on a wide range of matters from vanilla bilateral loans to LBOs. A recent notable transaction is a hybrid funds financing deal which relied on both recallable and uncalled capital from investors of a Singapore-based healthcare fund. This landmark transaction is one of a small handful of hybrid facilities in the Asian fund finance market.

In the global markets space, Natixis legal advises on a wide range of matters from OTC derivatives, note issuance transactions to securitisations and repackaging.

In the contentious space, the Asia Pacific legal function has earned considerable internal recognition for assisting the bank in the restructuring and recovery efforts on certain debt facilities, including in some instances via contested civil claims in China and Singapore in conjunction with external counsel.

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?

Natixis legal in Asia Pacific is tasked with monitoring changes in law and regulation which could affect the products our business lines can or do transact, how they transact them and the terms of those transactions in many more jurisdictions in Asia Pacific than we have lawyers in. In order to safeguard against various risks materialising, and to fulfil our roles as advisors to our business lines in a cost-effective manner, in the absence of legal personnel in each jurisdiction, we have developed an APAC framework for: preserving, sharing and reusing knowledge assets acquired during the course of transactions; collectively reviewing the catalogue of legal and regulatory changes presented to us on a quarterly basis by our partner law firms in each jurisdiction; and utilising existing paid and free industry body and legal knowledge resources, integrating this framework into our approvals processes, revisions to our contractual terms and to generate updates and training we deliver to management, internal stakeholders and business lines.

In order to manage external legal costs effectively in setting up our framework, we have added a paid subscription to complement our knowledge resources but otherwise the above has not resulted in any additional costs. We intend for this framework to generate the universe of data for our internal AI to work with once the bank is in a position to deploy it.