About

Ben Hamilton, head of legal for Asia and Hong Kong, leads the legal team at ANZ Bank of eight lawyers and two non-legal staff that support the whole region. The team is divided through product and geographical lines: the institutional team led by Andrew Tam covers loans, transaction banking and related product lines from Hong Kong, while the markets team led by Sharon Chin (who herself is based in Singapore) covers markets transactions and documentation. In the last two years the bank has transformed with ANZ recently selling its retail and wealth businesses to DBS in five Asian jurisdictions with the Hong Kong legal transfer completed in September 2017. Hamilton described the de-coupling of an entire business unit and sale and regulatory process as ‘enormously complex. The sale also reduced the coverage of the legal team following a period of tail management’. ANZ has also undergone a significant reshaping of its institutional business model which has adjusted the type of clients the bank is working with in Hong Kong and across the region. It has moved away from the commercial sphere and now focuses on multinational, major local corporate and financial institution clients who value ANZ’s regional footprint and whom it can serve in various markets with its product offering. The markets team in Asia was involved in supporting the global Markets Legal team with substantive re-documentation efforts in a nine-month period in connection with G20 regulatory changes. The global markets team also implemented new technology via JIRA and adopted agile working methodology internally following the completion of the variation margin deadline in March 2017 to improve and better manage the project to 100% completion rates and meet the initial margin regulatory deadline on 1st September 2017. ANZ also became the first Australian bank to become a member of the OTC Clearing of the Hong Kong Exchange which led to capital savings due to reduced risk-weighted assets (RWAs) and contributed to reduction in counterparty risk exposure. Hamilton describes the Hong Kong legal team as ‘a collaborative, commercial, pro-active, solutions orientated team that is committed to doing the right thing to get the deal done’. He continues, ‘the culture of the team is of paramount importance to us and it must be an environment where every member of the team is heard and feels free to share their views. We are as informal as possible and run a very flat structure. We want people to have as much opportunity to show their skills and develop in front of the people they support. We are here to help the bank succeed – in the right way – and not to be a block to getting things done, but to guide the process to achieve the best outcome’.