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A well-known banking institution with a long history in Italy dating back to 1925, Barclays possess a talented legal team in the country that received special mention from a private practice source for their contribution to several important deals that have further boosted the bank’s profile. They explained: ‘Barclays in Italy concluded important commercial deals in the past year, including one in which Cerved Credit Management Group unit signed an important commercial contract with Barclays Bank to exclusively manage an extremely high value mortgage portfolio’. Davide Spreafico, head of legal – personal, corporate banking and shared services in Italy leads a team of five lawyers who are driven by an ethos closely related to serving the business. Spreafico saying their work is conducted under a spirit of ‘commitment and compliance with Barclays’ values’. Having undergone a huge restructuring effort of Barclays’ Italian legal team with the view to designing a tailor-made function that is able to meet changing company strategy and priorities, Spreafico explains that they are in a position to ‘meet changing company strategy and priorities, improving efficiency, delivery and savings’. The benefits of this have already been proven, Spreafico highlight a number of ‘huge’ deals including ‘sales of on-going concerns, NPLs and much more, all of which have been managed by the local Teams with M&A Group Legal and external counsels’, showing the effectiveness of the lawyers and the degree to which they are involved with the business. Proud of the way the Barclays Italy legal team is forward-thinking in nature, the team has led recent innovations concerned with the digitalisation of in-house legal work, ‘internalising litigation activities and tracking legal risk’. This has, he claims, been crucial in ‘innovation and managing of the risks and legal costs plus a focal point for strategic advice to the top management’. In the context of being a financial institution in the post-2008 Financial Crisis environment, there are still several legal and regulatory hurdles to overcome for Barclays, which the legal team will be of the utmost importance in navigating successfully. As a bank that is inevitably tied to its base in the United Kingdom, Spreafico identifies ‘ring-fencing regulation in UK market and Britain’s upcoming exit from the European Union’ as being the key issues they will have to tackle in the coming months.