Team size: 3

What are the key projects you have been involved in over the past twelve months?

Over the past twelve months, I have been leading the development and structuring of a strategic alliance with the country’s leading financial conglomerate. My role has involved designing and structuring new financial products to be launched both within the conglomerate’s ecosystem and for the clients of its member financial institutions. I have acted as the primary legal architect of the partnership framework, ensuring that product structures are commercially viable, legally sound, and aligned with the regulatory requirements applicable to each entity involved. The outcome has been the creation of a pipeline of new products ready for implementation across multiple institutions within the conglomerate.

Can you describe an instance where your legal advice directly influenced business strategy or commercial objectives?

The clearest example is the intersection of legal structuring and product design in the context of foreign exchange and payments regulation. When developing new payment and international collection products for clients both in Colombia and abroad, the legal analysis of the applicable FX regulatory framework, particularly, payment service aggregators directly shaped the product architecture. Rather than simply validating a pre-defined commercial structure, the legal input influenced how the product was built from the ground up, ensuring regulatory compliance while preserving commercial viability. In several instances, identifying the correct regulatory treatment of an operation opened up new product opportunities that the business team had not previously considered.

How has the role of general counsel evolved, and what are the most important attributes for the modern in-house lawyer?

The modern general counsel must go well beyond legal risk management. Today, the role demands a deep understanding of the business model and its operations, commercial logic and strategic objectives to the point where legal input actively improves the product and generates new business opportunities. Regulations carry implicit business models within them, and the general counsel is often uniquely positioned to identify those opportunities precisely because of their combination of legal expertise and intimate knowledge of the company’s capabilities. The most important attributes are business fluency, the ability to translate regulatory complexity into commercial insight, and the courage to be a strategic partner rather than a gatekeeper.