About

AIB is one of Ireland’s largest banks and one of the largest investors in Irish business as well as being a strong player in the commercial banking and financial research market in Ireland and through its affiliates in Northern Ireland. Considered one of the “big four” Irish commercial banks, AIB has a highly capable and 134-strong legal team to support its businesses that provide comprehensive financial products and services to a wide-range of customers, and is led by group general counsel Helen Dooley and her seven-strong senior management team. Providing expert coverage for the bank over employment, commercial, property, company and corporate law among many other fields, the team is one of the largest legal departments in Ireland. Andrew Smith, head of group legal services, has a primary expertise in employment and covers this practice area for the bank among others. He detailed some of the team’s main accomplishments over the past 24 months: ‘It goes without saying that the key role played by AIB legal, under the direct leadership of Helen Dooley, in Europe’s largest 2017 IPO – AIB’s return to full listings on the Irish and UK stock exchanges – represents a huge highlight; but there have been numerous other achievements as well. The legal function has been a key stakeholder and driver as AIB responds to the agenda of regulatory change which all financial institutions face – from PSD2 and MIFID2, through domestic legislation such as the Central Credit Register and the SME Regulations, to the uniquely wide ranging and complex impact of the GDPR. In addition to this, in order to ensure that AIB can live out its purpose of backing its customers to achieve their dreams and ambitions, we constantly challenge ourselves to provide innovative, customer-centric solutions to legal issues; be that enabling digitisation and the use of digital signatures, ensuring that customer documentation is written in plain, jargon-free language or putting legal shape on AIB’s relationships with exciting, innovative Fintech providers. Despite Ireland’s rapidly improving economic position, the legacy of the financial crisis is still with us.  AIB legal is central to AIB’s efforts to identify and provide remediation to customers who were wrongly treated in respect of their tracker mortgages, and also to ensuring that AIB meets its strategic goal of normalising its non-performing exposures before the end of 2019.  Legal has played a key part in helping AIB reduce its non-performing exposures from over €30bn in 2013 to €10bn by the end of 2017.