About

A well-recognised name in the Italian in-house community, Riccardo Quagliana started his legal career at international law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer as a trainee in 1996 and worked there for six years. After a brief, one-year spell as a junior associate at Banca IMI, where he specialised in capital markets, M&A and corporate sectors, Quagliana joined the European asset management firm Prelios. Quagliana enjoyed his time there, as he was partnering with very capable managers within a very ‘complicated business model’. He says, ‘we were used to making investments in real estate deals and at the same time providing advice to joint-venture service agreements in very advanced real estate work’. In this context, Quagliana began to be more familiar with the banking sector, setting up joint-ventures with Crédit Agricole and Goldman Sachs. ‘These experiences allowed me to contact banks knowing the culture of Italian banks, giving me something which would prove to be very important later in my career’, he says. When joining Bank of America Merrill Lynch as a Director in 2011, Quagliana was truly familiar with business logic rather than merely looking at the legal framework of transactions. When he arrived in his current role as general counsel at Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena in 2013, the bank was undergoing a transformation, moving away from being a traditional Italian retail bank to become a modern financial institution as demanded by the European Central Bank, a process that required a completely different approach in legal and corporate programs. In order to meet these challenges, Quagliana was responsible for the establishment of three departments: litigation; consultancy and corporate; and M&A. Over the course of his professional career, Quagliana has particularly impressed colleagues in the in-house community with his involvement in a plethora of significant transactions, as well as his ability to deal with tough situations in the context of his company.