In a changing financial landscape, how does the company remain competitive against new phenomena such as fintech and blockchain, and how does the legal team assist with this?

Bitso has been ahead of the game. We are a crypto exchange with fiat on or off ramps in Mexico, Argentina, Brasil and Colombia and serve more than four million users. We have a robust team that oversees corporate global matters, regulatory landscape and technical aspects of regulation, commercial legal matters, intellectual property, data privacy, compliance, compliance investigations, and risk assessment.

I have the honour of leading the legal-regulatory, compliance and risk teams which performs in a highly evolving industry thanks to all the members that comprise our team. Each of the heads and leaders of the group understand that execution is key for our successes.

In addition, Bitso is considered as Fintech, and since our inception, technology has been our go-to business. We leverage on technology to conduct screening of our vendors, providers, gathering actionable intelligence on counterparties, utilising proprietary databases combined with artificial intelligence to have best industry standards and social media to perform backgrounds checks. Our corporate books and records are stored using blockchain technology and I believe that we will see such actionable items by many other entities including law firms.

In what ways do you see the in-house legal role evolving in your region over the next few years?

As stated before, law firms, big enterprises, public companies need to challenge the status quo and think out of the box. We live in a fast-paced industry and world, if we keep using the same standards that we have used in the past, we will not evolve. Blockchain technology, smart contracts, decentralised finances are here to stay, and the legal teams should leverage on that to enable their organisations.

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

Bitso has evolved over the past five years. We began as one Mexican entity but now, we operate our crypto exchange in Gibraltar, and provide crypto custody from there to our users. We also succeeded in a financial round by having new capital from investors such as QED, Kaszek, Pantera, Tiger and Coateu and were valued at $2b. We participated in analysing crypto regulation around the globe and provided feedback. We are proud of state-of-the-art technology we use to onboard our users from a compliance perspective. On top of that, we successfully executed sponsorship agreements for a Brazilian and Mexican soccer team, as well as the Mexican national soccer team.

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

Companies are no longer looking for the lawyer that only understands the law theoretically, or a risk team that only mentions and outlines risks or a compliance team that only screens users. Companies are on the hunt for lawyers that have a business perspective and are willing to manage risk and provide clear and easy guidelines for the commercial and product teams, who in turn provide transparent messages to their users.

There is a need for a business-driven compliance team that are willing to use technological resources to understand and serve the client better. Companies also need policies that are manageable, can be followed, and efficient not hundreds of pages that nobody reads. Companies need the legal, compliance and risk team to understand technology and use it, including smart contracts and blockchain technology.