About

Barcelona-headquartered CaixaBank has the most extensive network of branches in Spain, and offers a full range of banking services and insurance activities to its approximately 13 million customers. With a compact team of four legal staff, Lluis Vendrell Pi, chief legal officer – corporate M&A, has overseen a stable legal function dealing with all M&A transactions at the bank, and is rooted in the previous banking entity subsumed in June 2011, when Criteria CaixaCorp absorbed the banking business of La Caixa and the current CaixaBank was created. Particularly proud of their innovation, the team has been at the forefront of transactions in the region, including leading CaixaBank’s acquisitions of a Portuguese bank that took place over a two year period. After a failed first offer in 2015 Vendrell and the team successfully completed the second tender that was launched and was registered with Portuguese regulators in February 2017. This cross-border banking transaction under the Eurozone regime was said by Vendrell to be precedent-setting and ‘attracted attention in Portugal and Spain to a high degree’, evincing the level of innovation the team offers. Moving much of the M&A work in-house has allowed the team to have a true impact on the business, according to Vendrell. These successes have come even in the face of difficult hurdles imposed through a variety of factors, not least the role of regulators which Vendrell states are having an ‘increased role in every M&A transaction’. For example, the aforementioned transaction needed authorisation from eight different foreign regulators in addition to the domestic security advisor in Portugal; this produced ‘lots of paperwork and coordination and this is a very cumbersome aspect of the M&A panorama’, says Vendrell.