About

Funds director, head of legal at IQ-EQ, spent 15 years in private practice in a variety of commercial law roles including a spell in William Fry and as managing partner in a small commercial firm in Limerick. When an opportunity came up to join First Names Group’s Irish office in 2013 she joined, and as she says ‘jumped at the chance to bring my private practice experience into a business context’. Since then, she has assumed a variety of roles, starting with managing the Irish legal and compliance function for the company’s corporate services business, moving to head of legal, risk and compliance for the global corporate service line, culminating in her hybrid role for the company’s offshore fund administration business, which she commenced in 2018. O’Riordan highlights that, she ‘reorganised the legal, risk and compliance function for our corporate services business by introducing the three lines of defence model ensuring we had requisite local experience in our key regulated jurisdictions. This involves a programme of remediation, re-education and right sizing that was challenging but ultimately successfully implemented’. She identifies that the enactment of the GDPR posed significant challenges to staff and clients alike in the funds industry, saying ‘our preparations involved an extensive client and staff education and information programme as well as a considerable internal compliance programme which is now forming part of our BAU. It has been personally very satisfying to see the great awareness created amongst our staff regarding data privacy and its importance to fund investors and how they are translating that to their day-to-day roles’. The company is now in the process of integrating multiple legal functions across the group under the IQ-EQ Group’s group general counsel, Habiba Boughaba, who is based in Luxembourg. Following First Names Group’s acquisition by SGG in 2018, the enlarged group has been renamed IQ-EQ.