What are the most significant cases, projects, or transactions that you and your legal team have recently been involved in?

It has been an unusually busy year, largely because the rulebook changed beneath us. The 2025 Payment Systems Regulation redefined what a sub-acquirer is and how it is supervised – not merely a compliance footnote, but a fundamental change to how we are permitted to operate and contract.

Much of the legal team’s work has been structural: reassessing our licensing position under the new regime and redesigning our regulatory framework, merchant contracts and governance arrangements. The other two key workstreams were also regulatory: laying the legal foundations for connecting to the country’s new instant payment rail, the SGPI, and aligning our onboarding processes with the regulator’s new digital onboarding circulars. It has been less a year of closing a single major deal than of rebuilding the foundations on which the entire business operates.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

Resilience comes from the legal function being closely integrated with the business, rather than operating at arm’s length. If the legal team is only brought in at the end of a process, every issue becomes an emergency. When embedded in decision-making, however, we can identify risks as they emerge and address them early, making them far less costly and disruptive than reacting after the event.

In practice, this means preserving optionality in key contracts, stress-testing the scenarios we would least like to face, and maintaining robust business continuity and incident response plans so that the organisation is prepared when disruption occurs. It also requires the right temperament: remaining calm and measured when others are not.

In a crisis, a legal function that remains composed and solutions-focused is ultimately more valuable than one that is simply thorough.

General counsel often speak of the need to be strategic to reach the pinnacle of the profession. What does being strategic mean to you?

Being strategic starts with asking a different question. The instinct of a junior lawyer is to ask, “Is this legally correct?” A strategic General Counsel asks, “What is the business trying to achieve, and how can I help it get there safely?” That is where a General Counsel earns their seat at the table — rarely by saying no, but more often by saying, “Yes, and here is how.”

The second element is perspective: anticipating problems before they arise and positioning the business to respond, particularly in a regulated environment where the warning signs often appear well in advance. Underpinning both is the ability to prioritise — distinguishing what is genuinely material to the business from what is merely noise disguised as urgency.

Strategy is as much about what you choose not to do as what you do.

What do you think are the most important attributes for a modern in-house counsel to possess?

First, trust — being the person that leadership relies on to tell the truth, including the truths they would rather not hear. That requires independence, so your advice is not simply an echo of what others in the room want to hear, and the right temperament, so that it is listened to rather than resisted. The moments when your judgement matters most are often those in which everyone else is under pressure.

Close behind comes commercial judgement and the ability to translate legal advice into business decisions. This means understanding the business well enough for your advice to reflect how it creates value, and presenting leadership with clear recommendations rather than simply saying, “It depends.”

Finally, breadth matters as much as depth: having sufficient range to recognise when an issue is genuinely serious and when specialist expertise is required, while remaining comfortable making decisions based on incomplete information, because business inevitably moves faster than the law evolves.