About

Dionisio Ismael Machuca Massis has served as the vice president legal and secretary for Banco Agrícola for four years where he has worked with multi-disciplinary teams to achieve a better understanding of the business in order to be a better legal adviser. As an integral part of the bank, he has worked on product design, forming the M&A teams, project finance, corporate governance, structured finance, trusts and investment funds among others. His prime goal has been to better align the business with legal operations, as well as change the mind-set of the team on the need of getting a deep knowledge of the business in order to become strategic partners of all business areas and understand how to aggregate value while providing legal security to the operation. A way he maximises this is by working on a metrics design for legal operations, linking the legal work to business results, helping the team to understand how the legal department works, and giving confidence to the organisation on how to create value. ‘This approach encouraged the legal point of view to be part of every decision making process as an integral process and not as a filter after decisions have been discussed’, says Machuca. In addition to this he has a good relationship with regulators and supervisors in order to join efforts to develop a digital transformation of the financial system. Machuca is a member of the Committee for the Digital Transformation of the bank, participating on the design and approval of new products, electronic signature and electronic documents development, authorisation and implementation of the first Investment Funds Administrator of a Financial Conglomerate in El Salvador and its first investment fund, trusts design and development among others.