Lim Yu Mei – GC Powerlist
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Malaysia 2023

Financials

Lim Yu Mei

Country general counsel | HSBC Malaysia

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Malaysia 2023

legal500.com/gc-powerlist/

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Lim Yu Mei

Country general counsel | HSBC Malaysia

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

The legal team has been very much a part of the main project team focused on reviewing the end-to-end customer journeys to digitise our service offering to both retail and corporate clients over the past few years.

We have had to reconsider the sales journey from a new sales channel perspective; ensure the salient product features and risks are presented and highlighted succinctly and fairly to the customer, shorten our terms and conditions to fit into mobile device pages, and review data sharing and transfer arrangements, among others. We also had to review terms and conditions imposed by product partners and ensure operationalisation of the conditions imposed.

HSBC led, arranged, and managed an extensive spectrum of ESG debt solutions, acting as a sole sustainability structuring coordinator for corporate clients to set up their sustainable finance frameworks according to their ESG commitments, and considering potential areas of concern that could lead to greenwashing risks or misleading or inaccurate disclosures to investors. We were involved in the distribution of the first ASEAN Social SRI Sukuk in Malaysia, the first Sustainability Sukuk by Malaysia’s largest private healthcare provider and the subscription of an ASEAN Green SRI unrated Sukuk.

HSBC financed a Malaysian corporate client for a project in Mexico for security out of Mexico. Given the security concepts under Mexican law is not similar with common law, the legal team gapped the legal concepts available under Mexican law against the security required by the bank and developed workarounds with Mexican legal counsel to achieve the required compliance with credit approval conditions. Certain operational and legal restrictions on the client’s side surfaced and again, alternatives were required for the equivalent security positions to be achieved and syndicated internally with our credit approvers to derive comfort.

Recently, HSBC Securities Services was also appointed as one of the largest custodians for direct custody in the Malaysian market and the legal team was involved in the onboarding of a record number of unit trust funds over the past year and gapping the existing trust deeds and published fund documentation against HSBC’s internal requirements for understanding of gaps and risk mitigation considerations.

How do you see the general counsel role evolving in Malaysia over the next five-ten years?

General counsel will be valued if they can provide strategic advice across business and functional lines while pre-empting needs, risks, and opportunities. The more curious the general counsel is about matters beyond just the legal sphere, the more value they will be able to provide.

General counsel are risk managers, particularly of legal risk. Issues with risk management arise not only due to bad contracts, but also due to limitations in product understanding and an inability to enhance the end-to-end operational processes that deliver desired legal outcomes.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most? Which have you found most useful in your legal team?

We are looking into AI and how it might add or detract from our deliverables. We are also looking into building legal support to be delivered through Chatbot to service our 54 branch network relationship managers. We have already rolled out 50 self-service Chatbot journeys to external customers who use our internet banking as an alternative to branch banking. This chatbot was recently enhanced to allow customers to continue to chat on account related inquiries in a more secure environment after logging in to online banking without having to restart a new chat.

As we enter the next decade, what skills will a corporate legal team need to succeed in the modern in-house industry?

We will need to be business partners to our colleagues and add value by providing strategic advice beyond legal advice. This will require corporate legal teams to thoroughly understand the business, think commercially, and act prudently within the law and applicable regulations.

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