About

Since beginning her in-house career at the Mexican Securities Industry Association (AMIB), where she worked for six years, the ‘exceptional’ Isabel Ocaña has built an increasingly distinguished career. She spent over a decade at ING, where she rose to become regional chief compliance officer for Latin America, and then moved to Deutsche Bank Mexico as head of legal and compliance in 2011. Since then she has overseen the complete reorganization of the legal department, bringing most work in-house, and ensuring far sharper coordination with external firms (which are themselves subject to far more stringent selection procedures). The result has been a reduction in legal expenditure, higher quality service provision and the thorough inculcation of a culture of accountability. She has also increased Deutsche Bank’s participation in industry chambers, improving its relations with various finance-sector regulatory bodies in the process. In late 2013 Ocaña was appointed Deutsche Bank’s head of compliance for the Latin American region; she currently has a 13-strong team spread across Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Peru. As a result, her responsibilities are broad: secretary of the bank’s administrative council (and of the committees on reputational risk, and communications and control, among others), she advises on matters including lobbying, contracts, anti-money laundering, the coordination of litigations, and tax and labour issues, all in addition to compliance. Other major areas of engagement, recently, include FIBRAs (a Mexican real estate investment trust), and IPOs, such as IENova’s $598m global IPO in March 2013, the first energy-sector IPO in Mexico. Rightly proud of her position as the only woman on Deutsche Mexico’s executive board and of being the only Mexican in the bank’s Latin American regional team, she is characterised as ‘a brilliant lawyer with an exceptional grasp of banking legislation’, and as ‘a strong character’, someone who is ‘never scared of taking difficult decisions’.