After a career working in a variety of private practice and in-house roles, Rita Rendeiro has a track record of serving as a legal adviser within many multinational banks and industry entities. Her track record includes a near-two year role at the Portuguese Securities Commission as a legal adviser in the markets and issuers’ supervision department, during which she oversaw approval processes of IPOs, listings and delistings, debt issuances and ongoing supervision and governance requirements.

Since mid-2015 she has been in her current role as head of legal at Deutsche Bank’s Portugal branch, where she leads a legal team providing across the board advice to the Bank’s many areas and businesses, liaising with regulators and implementing new legal frameworks relevant for each activity. Rendeiro admits that the past three years in her position have been ‘particularly rich in [terms of] new legislation and regulation of huge relevance to the sector’. Regarding this dynamic, Rendeiro states it is ‘imperative to say that one becomes increasingly used to think and act in “regulatory project mode”, meaning that there is a constant drive to feel the business needs and adapt them to the requirements in a way that best suits clients, teams and stakeholders while ensuring regulatory compliance’.

The role has put her in contact with and ensured she is close to clients and their needs, as opposed to more structured finance and capital markets environments. This has contributed to a different vision of the industry on her side, which has become more driven by practical aspects resulting from the Bank’s day to day business. In terms of her current agenda, Rendeiro has been tasked with the recently announced agreement to sell the private and commercial clients business of Deutsche Bank in Portugal to a Spanish bank. She calls this ‘an exciting and very demanding’ project, in which she has been working on for almost a year in parallel to her usual functions as head of the legal department.