Pedro Machado currently serves as the chief legal counsel at Banco de Portugal, the central bank of the Portuguese Republic. With a career that spans more than 15 years in financial regulation and supervision, he previously served as a financial supervision, risk and regulation partner with PwC Portugal.

Amongst his achievements in the sector, Machado was behind coordinating the Ministry of Finance’s tasks and responsibilities for the implementation of the financial stability pillar of the Portuguese Financial and Economic Assistance Programme, working on the preparation of the resolution legal framework and the revision of the recapitalisation legal regime. As an in-house lawyer he states he has engaged throughout his career in ‘very stimulating’ projects. One example is steering a wide-ranging restructuring of Banco de Portugal’s in-house legal department to adapt to the new challenges and increased responsibilities with which the institution is faced and entrusted, most notably by the institutional framework of the banking union. Amongst these projects, he highlights the public recapitalisation of four banks in Portugal in 2012, the resolution of Banco Espírito Santo in 2014 and the post-resolution litigation. ‘Each of these projects required dealing with novel legal issues that have never been tested either domestically or at European level. As such, innovative approaches coupled with holistic thinking have become of the essence in any of those projects.

This experience has strongly contributed to enriching my know-how in both legal and multidisciplinary ways, and helped me improving working with team members and counterparts with diversified academic and professional backgrounds’, Machado explains. He has also advised banks on resolution planning and formed part of the team that assisted the resolution of Banca Privada d’Andorra.