Team size: 23, including legal, paralegal and interns

What are the main challenges your legal team faced in the past year?

Last year proved to be very challenging for the Legal Division of Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB), as we also act as the competent national authority for monitoring the compliance of credit, financial and payment institutions licensed in Austria with the economic sanctions implemented by the European Union. The historically unique scope of the sanctions imposed on Russia (and Belarus) made it necessary to pool resources within the department for sanctions-related activities to handle the related tasks successfully.

In addition, we had to continue to fulfil our other agendas as the OeNB’s Legal Division with high-quality standards.

Given the abovementioned situation, this represented a unique challenge for all team members. However, we were able to deal with delivering core tasks, building up new competencies and steering the necessary structural change. This was only possible due to the very high level of professional expertise of the individual members, their passionate commitment, and a very strong team spirit.