Team size: 16

Key team members: Jessie Loong, Fiona Ng, Edward Lam and Tan Mingfen

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

Changi Airport is working hard to deliver smooth ground transitions as international passenger air traffic rebounds. After delivering a prodigious amount of legal work in re-negotiating hundreds of contracts and tenancies to manage the Covid-19 disruption, enabling the airport’s execution of fast-paced operational changes during the pandemic, providing relief to airport partners and responding to a plethora of emergency legislative changes, the CAG legal and compliance team has gladly switched gears over the past year to power and support a steep and challenging recovery. Determined to exceed its reputation for driving excellence, CAG now also sets its sights on being the most innovative airport company in the world.

We work hand-in-glove with our airport operations teams on a range of innovative solutions such as the Safe Travel Concierge and ChangiQ. These include proof-of-concept trials and collaboration agreements to transform airside operations. Reported highlights include autonomous baggage tractors and self-docking passenger loading bridges. Both are world firsts.

Our legal support extends to the design and construction of Changi East and the new Terminal 5, the largest development project in Singapore which will double the capacity and footprint of our existing 4 terminals. On this front, after managing a pandemic-induced 2-year pause to the programme, we are engaged in an intense re-start involving a myriad of stakeholders.

On protecting personal data, we are proud to have achieved the Data Protection Trust Mark in 2023, following a gargantuan our team led cross-functional effort.

Our division supports all sustainability and environmental compliance matters. While the developments in the Asia Pacific lag Europe, Changi Airport is a leading airport in these matters in the region.

We run alongside our ambitious commercial and digital teams to build and enhance our e-commerce businesses (iShopChangi, Sift&Pick), payment solutions (ChangiPay), and expand wallet functionality and jurisdiction; and execute on numerous promotions and marketing initiatives including collaborations with major brands (e.g., Disney, Marvel, Sanrio) to drive sales and shopping footfall.

Lastly, on insurance, we are responsible for delivering CAG’s risk transfer programme, Legal and compliance team has launched a competitive tender and led a cross function evaluation process to select a new operational insurance broker for CAG and its key subsidiaries. Intensive transition activities are being managed.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

The CAG legal and compliance team is continually looking out for opportunities to better equip and/or make life easier for our internal business partners. Recent innovations, fully done in-house, include:

Building a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) app to digitalise and streamline the DPIA process. Our DPIA app accelerates and better documents the DPIA process to support faster rollouts and enable experimentation by the business whilst ensuring compliance with data protection obligations.

Developing and launching DP Dojo, our internal microsite for all things personal data protection (DP) to serve as a repository for all DP-related information and a collaboration platform for members of our DP community. This enables business units to self-help for common issues and frees up legal team bandwidth to solve more complex problems.

Using robotic process automation to despatch automatic incident reports to provide timely notification to our insurers as part of our claims management process.

Overhauling our standard conditions of contract into a shrink-wrapped, simplified version to fast-track low-risk innovation-related procurement.

Apart from legal matters, has the team worked on other company initiatives?

Our team was instrumental in birthing Changi Foundation, CAG’s philanthropic arm, as a company limited by guarantee, as well as its registration as a charity and grant-maker. This enables enduring and consistent “doing good” across generations of company management. Changi Foundation partners with other VWOs and galvanises the entire airport community to the cause of disadvantaged youths. During the pandemic, the ONEChangi community organised the donation and transport of oxygen concentrators to Indonesia to save lives when the need arose.

CAG’s anti-bribery management system is ISO37001-certified, and we maintain this year-on-year. CAG was the first airport company in the world to achieve this certification.

Our legal and compliance team was core to CAG’s issuances under its US$2bn multi-currency term note programme. Despite the pandemic, the notes were oversubscribed, and CAG rated AAA by Moody’s.

Our junior lawyers exercise their management chops in running our CAG legal internship programme. Over the last 5 years, we successfully hired 3 former interns into our team.