About

With an MBA in banking and finance as well as an LLM in international business law, Edgar Trueba has over ten years in-house in the financial sector, initially at Banco Mercantil del Norte, then as vice president and compliance officer at ING, and currently as executive director of legal and compliance at Morgan Stanley. Characterised as ‘innovative, exploratory and flexible’ by external counsel who have worked with him, ‘he’s always looking at how once can make business happen, always in accord with the law, but always looking to do business’. His career to date has also given him the uncommon experience of both assisting a bank departing the market (ING sold its insurance operations in 2008, and its pensions and savings assets in 2011, before authorizing regulator CNBV to revoke its banking and stockbroking licenses in 2012 – all matters handled by Trueba), and one growing its presence (Morgan Stanley has been involved in corporate banking in Mexico since 1999 but only opened its brokerage in 2011). Indeed, he regards the closure of ING’s subsidiaries, with their multiplicity of products and a limited time frame, as one of the major challenges of his career: ‘it was very enriching process and we achieved it without legal disputes or regulatory sanctions’. Thriving on an environment in which a multidisciplinary view of the matter in hand is the norm and in which ‘one has to act as both a guide and a facilitator’, he cites one of the key challenges as ‘not only keeping up to speed with regulatory change, that’s fundamental, but doing so without losing sight of the rest of the legal environment, “maintaining the bases”. That’s what is difficult!’