About

AlphaCredit is a finance company that provides specialty loans to the large, unbanked consumer market in Mexico and holds a credit portfolio of $87.5m. According to general counsel and compliance director Juan Salvador Nito Irigoyen, the current 12-member legal department has ‘been central in all major transactions of the company’. In one transaction in 2016, AlphaCredit acquired 95.6% of local consumer lender Grupo Finmart from EZCORP for $50m, which saw AlphaCredit’s presence in the consumer lending sector expand. The legal department has been involved in a variety of work as AlphaCredit continues to expand its operations and consumer base. The team advised on the arranging AlphaCredit’s first structured loan with an international bank in December 2014 and its first public securitisation in September 2015. Of the team’s importance to the company, Nito Irigoyen says: ‘Being a start-up, the legal department has been central in creating guidelines and procedures necessary to ensure the proper development of the company, including the creation of loan origination guidelines to ensure compliance with the collateral requirements set forth by our lenders’. AlphaCredit’s legal team has been particularly innovative in the area of technology, with the help of Gwendolyne Luna Sandoval, who is one of the non-lawyer members of the team. They have implemented a customer service desk to allow them to set and monitor service levels, as well as a software tool that alerts all relevant business areas about upcoming governmental filing deadlines.