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

One significant case has been the management of conflict of laws situations where counterparties have chosen more sympathetic forums overseas to achieve their preferred outcome. Given our actions are advised and taken based on Malaysian law provisions, we preferred and have successfully defended Malaysian courts as the appropriate forum for dispute resolution.

We have been building new skillsets in the legal team on end-to-end management of legal risk within the enterprise (i.e., proactive management of legal risk by business lines under advice from legal team based on our assessment of the level of legal risk inherent in the relevant business line and the adequacy of controls around these risks) in line with Prudential Regulation Authority regulations on non-financial risk management framework.

An example of the above would be the work undertaken on customer information breach management to reduce the number of breaches that we report to the data privacy regulators. Legal, as a second-line function responsible for data privacy, worked together with the first-line business/functions, to set up key risk indicators and capture breach data for reporting and based on the continuous monitoring of the KRI. We were able to take a view on the adequacy of controls and work with the first-line to enhance its controls where required. This led to best practices and IT enhancements that we locally put in place in addition to group mandated controls.

We have also conducted a simplification of template customer agreements. Incorporating fairness considerations have been key initiatives over the past few years and that will continue as an ongoing process as we look to legal design to further improve customer experience and look and feel in our digital channels.

How important is choosing to work with external lawyers who align with your company’s values? 

Our panel law firms are known for their professionalism and standards, however in this day and age, we find ourselves gravitating towards firms who can support our transition to digital banking. Before Covid, we had already launched e-sign with our vendors but when Covid hit, this was naturally extended to our customer interactions and lending which then required our panel firms to also step up and embrace acceptance of non-wet ink agreements

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?

There is scope for us to integrate technology more effectively in work. Workflow applications where required inputs and approvals are tracked and prompted through an automated process flow are incredibly useful where multiple stakeholders are involved for project execution.