About

With Pioneer Investments acquired by Amundi in late 2016, Colm Callaly (global legal, global head of distribution legal, head of legal Ireland) and his legal team have gone from operating in a small to medium size global asset manager to one of the largest in the world with around $1.5tr in assets under management. They have also increased in size from 40-50 individuals to over 120. Callaly explains that, perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the team’s work over the past two years has been related to ‘reorganising the team and aligning with the global legal team structure for Amundi’. Time for innovation and the adoption of new technologies has been found as well, however. ‘We have a tool which hosts all product documentation online and which external and internal counsel globally have read and write access to – this allows us to update documents internationally in real time. We also have developed a cloud-hosted tool for hosting this material and creating an audit trail for validation’, he adds. When discussing the overall character of the ten-person Ireland-based legal team, Callaly emphasises the ‘global mind-set’ which permeates it. ‘Nearly everything we do is for locations outside of Ireland, across Asia LATAM and Europe, and this attitude has really been the hallmark of the team’s work for the last 15 years; Dublin is a hub for implementing cross-border projects’, he explains.