Team size: Eight

First, can you please give us an idea of the sort of work your team has done recently (cases, transactions, projects)?

DgPays supplies payment services across the value chain for B2B businesses through technology, operational support, and consultancy across different industries. The most significant projects we have been focused on concerns our B2B business — Zabizu, through which we aim to ensure comprehensive product offering to expand customer base and cross-sell in Türkiye and beyond. Our Zubizu business aims to secure direct access to consumers via loyalty programmes, with future potential to offer lending, daily banking, and asset management products. The legal team has been responsible for analysing every legal aspect of the platform; while we were working on the project, there was an essential change in legislation that required us to create subgroups in the company and give them training on the new laws.

Furthermore, the regulation on the operation principles of digital banks and service model banking, aiming to determine the principles of branchless and service banking, was published in the Official Gazette on 29 December 2021 and entered into force on 1 January 2022. One of the ultimate goals of DgPays is to operate as a digital bank. Therefore, within the scope of our strategy, this new regulatory framework brought us other ambitious targets.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most?

FinTech encompasses the technological transformation of finance through digital financial services and the digitalisation of the global financial markets through the emergence of new start-ups around the world —DgPays is one of these companies established in 2017 in Türkiye, aiming to expand abroad in the near future. FinTech is a very dynamic, innovative, and technology-focused industry. It can potentially transform all traditional markets and processes into new ways of doing business. It should be mentioned that such a dynamic and fast-growing market includes its hardships and risks. As technology moves very fast, regulators may stay one step behind. The challenge is to ensure the balance between the innovative mindsets of stakeholders and the designation of appropriate legislative and regulative barriers.

Cybersecurity risks and protection of data issues are hot topics to be discussed and covered. The legal department is responsible for providing legal advice to business partners, chief security officer and risk analysts. We try to engage as much as possible with business units to understand their innovative mindsets and solutions along with the technology behind such services. Regulators are not expected to be able to control or predict what innovation will look like in the future but take into consideration the pace and disruptive nature of financial innovation. It is worthy to note that the developments will need to be continuously followed up, and regulatory frameworks should be adapted accordingly.