| HSBC
HSBC
| HSBC
| HSBC Vietnam
| HSBC Singapore
| HSBC Bank Malaysia
| The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) India
How would you introduce the legal team and its role within the organisation? HSBC is one of the world’s largest international banking and financial services organisations with origins in India...
| HSBC Securities
With numerous lawyers in its Mexico and Argentinian hubs along with many more throughout the region, the operations of HSBC Securities’ Latin American in-house legal team are many and varied....
| HSBC Bank
HSBC Bank has operated in Turkey since 1990, providing services in the areas of wholesale banking, retail banking and wealth management. It offers its Turkish customers financial solutions through its...
| HSBC México
Covering legal matters for HSBC México, one of Mexico’s four largest banking and financial service companies, the legal team comprises of 108 members (83 lawyers and 25 paralegals), specialising in...
Henk Crouse, general counsel, leads the legal team at HSBC supervising three lawyers and an assistant handling the global banking colossus’ legal affairs across Africa. The team proactively steers the...
| HSBC
HSBC was founded in 1865 to facilitate trade between Asia and the West, in particular Great Britain. It has since become one of the largest global banking and financial services...
| HSBC Banking (China)
HSBC is a major international retail and commercial bank with its Chinese headquarters in Shanghai, and since 2007 has been one of the first locally incorporated foreign banks. However, with...
| HSBC
HSBC is the seventh largest bank in Argentina, it provides a full range of banking and financial products and services including consumer finance, insurance, investment and corporate banking to over...
| HSBC Africa
It is not easy to stand out as a legal team in a large global organisation famed for the quality of its legal advisers, but according to an independent survey...
The UK government’s rules for the ring-fencing of retail and wholesale banking activities will require all UK banks with more than £25bn in deposits to set up a separate legal entity handling core deposit-taking activities by 2019. For the legal team of any of the UK-headquartered clearing banks, this is a big job. Matthew Cottis of Hogan Lovells comments: ‘The experience and unflappable demeanour of [general counsel (GC)] Hugh Pugsley and his team have helped HSBC rise to the very formidable challenge of ring-fencing. They have shown themselves to be an indispensable part of the bank’s senior leadership at a very difficult time for the sector.’ A 60-strong team led by Pugsley supports HSBC’s high-street operations in the UK, including lending to commercial and corporate customers, and private banking services. Pugsley was previously GC for group legal at Lloyds Banking Group, where he worked on the 2015 initial public offering (IPO) of TSB. Though the pre-IPO legal work relied on a similar court process to lift and shift parts of the business into TSB, Pugsley says the current ringfencing work at HSBC is of an entirely different magnitude. ‘In terms of both the legal issues we are encountering, and the operational and infrastructural complexities that it entails, the scale of the ring-fencing work is pretty much unprecedented. This has been a huge amount of work for the whole organisation.’ Alongside this, Pugsley and the team have been overseeing the separated high-street bank’s move to new offices in Birmingham. This has given Pugsley the opportunity to bring in new talent and develop one of the UK’s outstanding financial services legal teams. ‘If you look around the global legal executive committee, which I sit on, all of our lawyers could be GCs at any financial institution. That is unusual. They have the skills, experience and general gravitas to handle a front-line advisory role.’ Paul Holland of Dentons agrees with this assessment. ‘The team is small compared to its peers and needs to be very efficient. The quality of lawyer is therefore very high, and each member of the team shows an excellent understanding of what is required by in-house counsel in one of the most highly regulated and challenging environments for any lawyer.’ John Pitt, who heads up the retail banking and wealth management team, and Adam Coleman, who joined from The Co-operative Bank in 2017, were cited as standout performers within the team.
