What are the most significant cases, projects or transactions that you and your legal team have recently been involved in?

The most significant project has been securing the licence for the Dominican Republic’s first and only neobank. I co-led the legal and regulatory workstream, demonstrating compliance with every applicable requirement and coordinating the internal teams involved in the process.

The greatest challenge was never purely legal. It was demonstrating to the regulator that a bank with a disruptive, fully digital business model, with no in-person contact, could operate successfully within a regulatory framework originally designed for traditional banking.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

In a bank, legal risk runs through every operation. Managing it effectively can make the difference between an organisation being unable to operate and successfully delivering on what its stakeholders set out to achieve.

Instability rarely presents itself initially as a legal problem. It may arise as a regulatory shift, a technology failure or a change in the macroeconomic environment, and only then become a legal matter. The work must therefore begin before a crisis emerges and cannot depend on the isolated judgement of a single function.

It starts with the risk appetite that shareholders are prepared to assume across every aspect of the banking business. This provides the foundation for assessing the market in which we operate: a growing economy, an evolving regulatory framework, a population that increasingly expects immediate and fully digital services, and a deepening reliance on technology, together with all the risks that this entails.

Bringing risk appetite and the operating environment together informs our mitigating actions: continuous regulatory monitoring; stress scenarios whose legal implications we assess in advance, so that when one materialises we can choose between prepared options rather than improvise; and the discipline of participating in business decisions while they are still being made, rather than afterwards.

General Counsel often speak of the need to be strategic to reach the pinnacle of the profession. What does being strategic mean to you?

Being strategic means understanding the business, the regulation and the regulator, with each considered according to the role it actually plays. The useful question is not simply what the regulatory framework permits today, but what the market is demanding, where the organisation intends to be and what regulation will require of it along the way.

Where that answer encounters a constraint, the ‘technological dilemma in regulation’ comes into play. Regulate according to an outdated framework and technology can outpace the regulator’s enforcement capacity, while innovation stalls because the rules were never designed to accommodate it – resulting in a loss of social and economic value for the public and businesses alike. Leave it unregulated, however, and that same public may be exposed to systemic risks relating to consumer protection, transparency, stability and privacy.

Neither approach is without consequences, for both regulators and regulated entities. The pinnacle of a strategic General Counsel’s practice lies in finding the right balance and, above all, knowing how to communicate it to stakeholders so that they can act upon it.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on that you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful of?

I am watching two developments particularly closely.

The first is the rewriting of the rules themselves. Both globally and domestically, governments are seeking to determine how technological disruption affects people’s social, commercial, financial and cultural lives, and public consultations are already under way. Engaging with these consultations at an early stage should be central to any General Counsel’s practice. It can help prevent regulatory change from arriving abruptly, ensure that implementation reflects the realities of both the market and the organisation, and give businesses valuable time to anticipate change, adapt their operations and build a competitive advantage.

The second is the prudent adoption of artificial intelligence in decision-making. The risk lies not simply in the technology itself, but in the decisions it influences. In banking, AI is increasingly embedded in credit underwriting, KYC and AML screening, fraud detection and customer onboarding. Responsibility for those decisions, however, remains with the institution rather than the technology provider.

As regulatory scrutiny increases, General Counsel have a critical role to play in ensuring that innovation is accompanied by appropriate governance, accountability, oversight and privacy protections.