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The legal team is structured into five areas:
The legal directorate – which is in charge of the strategy and direction of all juridical matters related to the Davivienda Salvadoreño financial conglomerate.
The legalisation area – responsible for the formalisation of credit facilities and guarantees.
Corporate assessment – responsible for advising all areas of the bank’s business and operations, including the insurance, stockbroking and complementary financial services subsidiaries.
Litigation – responsible for the defence of the interests of the financial conglomerate in all areas of law: commercial, civil, labour, dispute resolution, contentious administrative matters, tax, among others.
Corporate governance – responsible for the management of all company law matters related to the financial conglomerate, including shareholders meetings.
The key lawyers are María Eugenia Zelaya, Eduardo Enrique Portillo, Oscar Mauricio Sánchez Montiel Portillo and Claudia E. Rodas.
It has created work flows via digital media that permit greater control, avoid the confusion of responsibilities and provide alerts when there are any blockages in work flow.
What is more, the team now works via collaborative digital systems that permit simultaneous work, the saving of (earlier) versions and actualisations in real time, thereby achieving efficiencies and avoiding unnecessary work meetings and saving on the use of paper.
The team’s culture can be summed up in the mantra: aiding the business and banking operationally with juridical security, from the origination of the initiative to its putting into effect.
The team is trained and educated to accompany all business initiatives or major operations from their outset, seeking to obtain judicial opinions so that these are integrated into the processes of due diligence in all of our financial products and/or changes in our processes, with lawyers assigned a responsibility for each business and operational area.
Legal thought draws, from the formation in the classroom, the doctrine of solemnity and the physical (palpable) existence of the documents that are generated or consulted to the lawyers in law. The lawyer is trained with doctrinal and customary paradigms that avoid an accelerated evolution of legal innovation, putting the legal specialist at a disadvantage in the face of changes and requirements of clients and other professional branches. This thought anchored in the lawyer’s mind creates a barrier to the development of new financial products from which modern society asks and demands, agility, ease, simplicity and above all, the non-physical presence to obtain financial services. Another obstacle to modernising legal thought is that the judiciary is managed by lawyers who suffer from the same lack of adaptability and also has no vision to change, which generates fears and risks that can be eliminated with the modernisation and training of the applicators of justice. It is here at this time that we have the lawyers who have dedicated their exercise of the profession to the direction and advice of financial institutions, to seek legal innovation, to interpret and apply the law so that, without violating or transgressing, it can be a work tool that enables us to create innovative documents that allow for the generation of digital financial products. The changing lawyers’ minds must include the clarity that a signature is not necessarily ink stamped on paper, that acceptance or agreement does not require that two or more people be present in the same place to take an agreement and that it still generates obligations and rights. The change in the legal culture of solemnity and the physical presence of the grantors must begin by breaking down the paradigms of the impossibility of carrying it out, because there is no law that fits our need expressly. You must continue to understand that a generation’s laws and norms does not work at the same rate as the need to meet the need in the binary era. Then comes the responsibility that we have to carry out those understandings in laws to find a way to leave the rigid framework and apply common sense. Creating and establishing the possibilities of giving life to new criteria are endless, since once they are tested and work, this will be the basis for the training of new lawyers who are trained in university classrooms. This line of thinking has allowed me to obtain authorisations from regulators for the creation of financial products, which even without having express laws, have been viable and are already in the local market. We must risk, we must analyse, and we must study and look for the way to say yes. Abandoning the old way of thinking and setting new goals. One of our great achievements during the last year’s management was to present to the banking regulators, our paper on ‘the viability of the use of digital identification means the substitution of the autograph signature in the consent for the collection and transmission of the information of the consumers or clients‘. With that study, paradigms were broken about the need for the physical existence of documents, and the proof of acceptance through the autograph signature. The study allowed the approval of a simplified savings account that allows financial inclusion for all segments of natural persons, allows you to create your savings account without having to reach the offices of the company, to identify yourself through digital means so that you can manage your funds easily and quickly, and now you can do it even without having data on your device. Lawyers must be a source of modernity and take digital development as our new frontier for the application of legal knowledge.
