About

‘A great leader, a first-class lawyer and a great person’ Nuno Moraes Bastos had five principles that allowed him to have this impressive career in such a short time: ‘obtain law-firm mind-set; avoid excessive specialisation; have a progressive development from a mid-sized law firm to an international firm; think global but act local; and be an all-rounder within the financial sector’ he says. Following this plan, he started his career at the Portuguese firm Coelho Ribeiro e Associados where he obtained experience in arbitration, before moving to the dispute resolution department of Simmons and Simmons. Following a secondment at Banif, the Portuguese international financial services group, at the age of 29 Moraes Bastos was asked to head the legal department of Banco Invest. Six years later, in 2011, he joined Zurich as general counsel and chief compliance officer, acting for all Zurich Insurance Group entities operating in Portugal, providing legal assistance and acting as company secretary and member of the shareholders’ meeting of local entities. ‘From 2011 onwards I have been leading the legal and compliance departments of Zurich Insurance in Portugal. This is a senior management role with multi-jurisdictional challenges and implies the full life cycle of policy management and implementation, such as ad-hoc and regular risk assessments’. Throughout his in-house career he has been instrumental in many strategic deals, his work at Banco Invest for the 2008 ABSP conduit, co-arranged by ABN-AMRO and Millenium BCP, worth €250m, which is considered the biggest securitisation programme in the history of the company. Also part of the management team at Zurich, Moraes Bastos concedes that moving into the insurance sector has been the biggest challenge he has taken in his career: ‘the insurance market has been built on long standing in-house careers, hence it is usual to see careers based in just one company, often with over 25 years in the same company, university degrees taken whilst working for the company and virtually only facelifts (no changes) to products or organisations. I joined the insurance sector in a very active and compliance-committed group, with 40% less FTE than our direct competitors, still being able to deliver by international standards on a very local basis. Doing that in a highly regulated area, with knowledgeable and active regulators, interacting with three different jurisdictions and bringing new areas and improvements to the company is a major challenge’.