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Incorporated as a joint venture between the State Bank of India, India’s largest bank, and GE Capital, SBI Card is a payment solutions provider with a customer base of over four million credit cards. SBI’s legal team was ‘instrumental’ when supporting the development and launch of the company latest Prime and Unnati cards according to Ugen Tashi Bhutia, executive vice president and general counsel. In addition to handling legal matters concerning SBI’s day-to-day activities, the legal team has excelled in implementing a number of changes to its structure and processes. As well as doubling in size over the past two years to 30 members, the legal function has been aligned as a single unit under the general counsel to ‘ensure harmony and synchrony between all legal resources and also creates a platform for intra-team knowledge sharing between different sub-verticals’, according to Bhutia. Another feature of the team’s internal changes is the digitisation of its processes. To this end, litigation manager Rashmi Arora has been singled out facilitating the automation of processes. Arora is also credited for her work on two significant IPR cases against counterfeiters. Deputy vice president for legal Ratnika Sehgal has also been highlighted as a key team member because ‘her knack for providing business oriented solutions has helped the team gain the confidence from business and has also supported the Company in being number two in the card industry in India’. A major development for SBI Card is the recent exit of GE from the joint venture. Apart from supporting the general corporate legal advisory function on day to day business need, deputy vice president for legal Shephali Birdi has taken a lead role in the GE exit and is also the facilitating the project for SBI Card to be independent from GE. Summing up the team ethos, Bhutia says ‘the legal team enables SBI Card to achieve its business objectives based upon clear eyed assessments of risks and rewards’.