About

Having over 200 million customer accounts and operating in more than 100 countries, Citibank is one of the leading global financial institutions in the world. It started doing business in Turkey in 1975 and since 2007 has provided securities services in Turkey under the name of Citi Menkul Degerler A.Ş. Citibank Turkey also has a representative office in Baku, Azerbaijan. Legal support in the Turkey, Central Asia and Caucasus region is currently led by Sureyya Ugurses, who is supported by a team of three senior lawyers, Beliz Basaran, Burcu Demirkaya and Duygu Ayas. Ugurses states that ‘the most important change for the legal team in recent times was the sale of their consumer banking division in July 2013, which subsequently saw a reorganisation of the bank’s structure’. Ugurses adds that after the sale and the reorganisation that followed, there was a shift in strategy to focus on commercial and corporate banking whilst the legal department underwent its own restructuring process. Ugurses explains that the team’s main purpose is to ‘ensure there is a balance between local and global legal requirements; to diligently manage legal and regulatory risk and to take a proactive role as a key member of the bank’s senior management team’. The Citibank legal team also introduced a secondment program with reputable law firms, which has the dual purpose of increasing knowledge sharing and creating a significant synergy between the external law firms and the Citibank in-house legal department. Since the global financial crisis, scrutiny of the local and global regulators in the banking sector has had a tangible impact on the way that the banks conduct their business. Due to this, the legal team serves an extremely important function in informing senior management of any upcoming regulatory changes and ensuring the collaboration between the business and control functions goes smoothly.