About

Ken Ebanks spent his early career in major law firms, starting as a media lawyer with Wiley Rein in Washington DC (where he attended Georgetown Law School) working for clients like Disney, CBS and Viacom, before moving to San Francisco to join the internet revolution of the late 1990s. He practised for more than a decade in San Francisco and Silicon Valley as a corporate technology partner with Howard Rice (now Arnold & Porter) and Covington & Burling, representing a blue chip client roster that included Electronic Arts, Yahoo!, Schwab, Microsoft, the National Football League, Patagonia and Amazon. He also spent two years in Geneva, Switzerland, running cross-border transactions and opening a Geneva office for Oppenheimer. In 2012 Ebanks moved to Amazon as Head of EU Legal for Amazon Video, based in Luxembourg and then London. In 2015, he was recruited by eBay and returned to Switzerland for his current role, heading up eBay’s Legal team for EMEA Cross-Border Trade. As eBay’s top legal executive outside the US, Ebanks leads a large, pan-European team addressing the myriad cutting-edge legal and regulatory issues facing eBay and other technology companies in Europe and around the world. Throughout his in-house career, Ebanks has been energized by the process of engaging with partners, regulators and competitors at the highest levels of the tech world and bringing new digital technologies to consumers. Amongst his most exciting tasks at eBay, Ebanks is currently helping to lead efforts to reboot the 20+ year old Internet pioneer through the use of cutting-edge developments like Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and Structured Data. Ebanks greatly enjoys his role of ‘operating in areas where the law is unclear or evolving’ which in turn ‘keeps things consistently interesting and creates a tremendous opportunity to think creatively’. At present, Ebanks is deeply engaged in revising eBay’s global approach to online payments, to ensure that buyers and sellers can interact seamlessly and efficiently. ‘Payments is a heavily regulated area that poses an endless series of challenges and opportunities, but I greatly enjoy engaging with payments experts, both internal and external, EU regulators and a cross-functional eBay team – including finance, compliance, product and tax – to find the best possible solutions for our business and consumers’.