Team size: 50

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

In-house legal services are ultimately always about balancing a wide portfolio of risks to create a favourable outcome both in terms of business value and risk exposure.

In periods of stability, I tend to steer the organisational focus towards business development and proactively creating efficiencies and better ways or working, which consequently also creates more resilience and capacity for managing uncertainty or periods of instability.

During crisis management or periods of instability, one of my primary focuses becomes ensuring that we have the right governance and information flows to enable fast and accurate decision making without creating additional risk exposure.

In Nordea we adapt a cascading strategic methodology that, by design, ensures alignment in strategic target setting. But, as a service function, I also ensure to make my business stakeholders’ strategy a matter of priority in my own target setting, to ensure we direct our attention where it gives the most value.

What are the major cases or transactions you have been involved in recently?

On August 27, 2024, the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) announced a consent order involving a $35m settlement with Nordea, due to historical AML weaknesses. As the responsible general counsel for all financial crime prevention legal advisory in the bank, managing this investigation and the subsequent amicable settlement has been a priority.

In your opinion, what are the main trends that are salient in your country currently (these can be legal, political, economy or business-based)?

Information security and resilience are topics that have become higher on both the political an industry agenda in the Nordics, and consequently also things that are closely monitored by regulators and financial supervisory authorities that supervise banks. This area, together with a wide slew of technology-related legislative initiatives has become the new regulatory frontier for the financial services industry and is closely connected to a keen interest in also exploring how technology developments can be incorporated into our daily business practices.