Bio

Oana has been working in the banking sector for over 20 years, and 18 of them were in ING Bank. She first developed her expertise in the business area, by providing support and then coordinating the legal team of the retail banking segment and continued by coordinating the general legal affairs and litigation team. More specifically, together with a small but courageous, talented and hardworking team, she provided legal support to the areas of procurement, outsourcing and DORA, HR, corporate governance, bank’s distribution network, dispute resolution and litigation, debt recovery and insolvency, AML&KYC, as well as issues related to insurance distribution via an ING insurance broker and provide general legal advice on a wide range of topics. For a period of several years, she also managed issues related to personal data management and GDPR.

“I have always positioned myself as a business partner. I like to sit at the same table with my business and legal colleagues, I like brainstorming, I like to understand the needs and vision of each stakeholder, I like the process of putting together ideas and building solutions. Although it may seem uncomfortable, I understand and appreciate the value of the challenge. I like people smarter than me and people with courage. I do not think I always have to be right. I believe that ‘together’ the wisest solutions are always found.”

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

The frequent crises we have faced together in recent years (COVID, war, economic crises and more) have naturally trained us to handle challenges — from the smallest to the most complex. This adds to ING’s very strong global risk management culture, which I would say is embedded in all our colleagues’ DNA, including the legal team.

I believe that staying closely connected with business and management is fundamental, through regular consultations and joint brainstorming sessions, to clearly understand direction and priorities, to anticipate and address challenges, and to be able to quickly adapt and reorganise.

Equally important is understanding that legal should not function as a separate enclave, positioned on a pedestal from which it issues opinions full of disclaimers that are excessively cautious or conservative, but rather as a partner to the business unit — creative, proactive, quick, and courageous. This is, in fact, the profile of the lawyer we seek to have in our team, and I strongly believe that, at this moment, ING’s legal team has the versatility, experience, and expertise needed to respond extremely efficiently to any type of challenge.

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments?

ING’s organisational culture is very helpful in this regard. ING is a company extremely involved with digitalisation and how various technologies can improve and streamline customer and employee experiences, processes, and resource consumption.

We look both locally and with the help of ING colleagues in other countries—trying to learn from and inspire each other—toward solutions involving advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation, which help all of us, including the legal team, to be faster and more focused on high-risk, high-impact issues, to eliminate or automate as many repetitive, low-risk or primarily operational activities as possible, and, importantly, to understand and learn more from the immense volume of data we access in our work.

When you say lawyer/in-house lawyer, the first image that often comes to mind is that of a serious professional in a suit, with a briefcase and a notepad. I like to picture someone with rolled-up sleeves, surrounded by others, smiling, with an iPad that runs an app with an integrated team task management system, where tasks can be viewed by everyone or on a need-to-know basis. Tasks are labeled, picked up, and prioritised automatically and quickly based on smart, predefined criteria, with alerts, statistics, and lessons learned.

How do we achieve this? We participate in trainings, we have workshops with IT, robotics, or analytics teams within the bank to better understand these technologies and explore together how we can leverage them in our field. We exchange experiences, as I mentioned, with colleagues from other countries. It is not a simple mission. It is continuous progress, with smaller or larger steps, but it is certainly necessary and something we enjoy.