About

FinEX Asia Group’s legal and compliance department is led by its general counsel Phyllis Xu, who has over 15 years of experience in advising on M&A, financing, alternative investment, private equity and asset management issues. She is a dual-qualified lawyer and has practised in Shanghai and Hong Kong, advising clients across the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. Earlier in her career, she was the Asia Pacific general counsel of a multi-national entity, a senior lawyer at DLA Piper, Jones Day, as well as other international law firms. She has led landmark cross-border M&A, project financing, public company takeovers and leveraged buy-outs exceeding the value of US$10bn. She leads a team of four lawyers and a non-lawyer associate, and despite the short period of the Group’s operations, the legal team has been extremely active and has achieved several notable milestones. These include a September 2017 establishment of the Group’s Singapore office, December 2017’s SFC approval for advising on securities and asset management licenses and in April 2018, when the team successfully closed a Series A financing for the Group holding entity. In June 2018, it signed a joint venture agreement with a Chinese SOE to co-manage its second private equity fund to strengthen the Group’s private equity arm; and in June 2018, it secured a money lender licence for the Group in Hong Kong. The team has also advised on some major deals for the company including assisting on the Group’s private equity fund to close a US$50m equity investment in Prosper Marketplace, a US online marketplace lending platform for consumer loans. This transaction was remarkable for its complex and multinational structure, where the legal team was deeply involved in extensive negotiations, reviewed rounds of past financing agreements across a large number of practice areas and jurisdictions, which set the benchmark for cross-border US-Chinese fintech investment. The team contributed to the broader deal and led the entire transaction procedure. Upon completion of this transaction, the Group is now Prosper’s single largest shareholder holding more than 10% of the outstanding shares. To strengthen its future operations, apart from ensuring compliance under SEC rules in the US, the team also assisted Prosper in obtaining a mortgage broker license in each US state to enter into the home equity line of credit market as required under US law. In another major deal, the team assisted the group to take over Incline Master Fund and Incline Fund II (“Funds”) from Incline Fund Management (a US Investment Manager) dealing with all of the US state filings and multi-jurisdictional regulatory requirements. Finally, the team established a long-term partnership with a Japanese financial institution to co-manage the Group’s fourth Cayman Islands open-ended fund, a very rare opportunity for a Hong Kong based asset-management firm. Xu has built a creative, efficient, cooperative and energetic culture in the legal team, using the motto is ‘every minute counts’ developed as the team learned to work across different jurisdictions across the world.