Team size: Five

What are the most significant cases or transactions you and your team have been involved in?

The most significant transactions we have been involved in recently were the sale of a Spanish NPL portfolio with a value of circa €30m. We co-operated with the group’s legal and corporate team to complete the change of ownership of Banco Primus, with the acquisition and full control by a BPCE funding. Additionally, we played a key role in the launch of an innovative business line of personal loans (B2C) that is 100% digital and fully dematerialised with remote identification and signature processes. Most of these achievements happened with teams mostly working remotely due to Covid-19 restrictions.

In what ways do you see the in-house legal role evolving in your region over the next few years?

The role of the in-house legal team will keep gaining further strategic prominence, integrating boards and product committees, rather than simply being a tactical response team to worrisome topics. In heavily regulated sectors such as banking, the role of legal and compliance teams will become more efficient, the closer and better integrated they are with business units and project teams. Legal teams will also have to evolve in order to monitor, understand and find opportunities for new ways of conducting business.

In a changing financial landscape, how does the company remain competitive against new phenomena such as fintech and blockchain, and how does the legal team assist with this?

Legal teams can and will remain competitive if they are able to understand and integrate new technologies in the process of legal advice, instead of having a thought process entrenched behind formalistic or merely superficial issues. A way of gaining edge may be to integrate people with non-legal backgrounds on legal and compliance teams. Engineering, data analysis and project management skills will enable to navigate technological concerns with better ease; while being able to adapt legal concepts that have been around for centuries to new technologies that have implications that we have just yet begin to fathom.