José Manuel García-Alfonso Martitegui has amassed an extensive career at Air Miles España – Travel Club, starting his career at the loyalty programs group in 1996, as head of the legal and HR department. Over the years his role has evolved to encompass other roles and areas of the business, including the chief compliance officer, data protection officer and board member and secretary of the board to name a few. García-Alfonso served as the first lawyer in the steering committee and the first in-house lawyer in the board of directors.

He has implemented a number of changes, adapting the internal structures to the new European GDPR, taking into consideration Travel Club databases, which are considered some of the largest Spanish databases in terms of number of users and complexity. He has also worked on the compliance adaption to the new criminal act, and is keen to highlight the importance of the in-house lawyer being a source of trust for the organisation, ‘not only through their knowledge of the law, but also through commitment to the project as well as to the policies and processes that ensure the correct application of the law in the company’ he says. As well as creating a relationship of trust he also strongly believes in aggregating business knowledge in order to provide value from a legal position, adding, ‘In my opinion, a top-quality in-house counsel should try to use his legal expertise very close to the business interests, in order to be able to understand what the company really needs and how to build the legal strategy to reach the corporative targets’.

He has been able to make instrumental internal changes by participating in the most relevant decision committees, while simultaneously moulding himself as a natural reference to the rest of the management team. García-Alfonso previously served as a lawyer within the industrial group and subsidiaries legal department at multinational banking group BBVA between 1991 and 1996.