Ana Valor’s 11-year long career with Avon Cosmetics – she previously worked in-house for Coca-Cola Spain and Autocontrol – has seen her take on a number of senior and multi-national roles for the company. Initially legal manager for Morocco, Greece, Egypt and distributor markets, Valor was made head of legal, compliance and governmental affairs for Spain,

Portugal and distributor markets in 2008 before seeing an expansion in her responsibilities to include the whole of the company’s Continental Europe, North Africa and Middle East clusters. From January 2014, her career took a different path when she took on a more specialised role as senior legal counsel for strategic projects in the EMEA region, a trend which continued into her current role as senior legal counsel for global data privacy. This role is hugely important for the organisation, as she is in charge of the company’s GDPR roll-out in EMEA and Latin America, as she explains: ‘Since June 2016 I have been working on the implementation of the GDPR, and have been leading the implementation of it using current policies and procedures worldwide.

I have also conducted auditing measures and designed the most challenging new procedures required by the GDPR, such as the privacy by design procedure’. She has also had a major impact on the collective abilities of the legal function at Avon. ‘I think I have changed the perception of the legal department positively among the peers and stakeholders with which I have been working’.