About

After qualifying in 2000, Marco Pompeo began his career working at Allen & Overy in the Rome and London offices, attending secondments at ExxonMobil and completing his LLM at Kings College University of London. Based upon the skills he acquired during this time, in particular his work on factoring and securitisation of trade receivables against public administrations, and through his studies, Pompeo joined the SF Trust Group, at the time controlled by RBS, as head of legal and compliance in 2011. Later that year, the group was acquired by Banca Sistema and Pompeo was promoted to his current role as head of legal and compliance. Pompeo had the opportunity to create a new legal department from the ground up at Banca Sistema, as he joined during a phase it was being created. Banca Sistema Group went through an expansion phase in 2016 by acquiring Beta Stepstone, a factoring company established in 2006 from the Fortress Group, and subsequently merging into Banca Sistema. The company has offices in Milan, Naples and Bologna, with approximately 180 clients and entertaining business relations with 100 public administration agencies. Further expansions included acquiring a strategic interest in CS Union, a leading independent NPL purchase debt collection company with €1bn under management, and in ADV Finance, and others. The reorganisation and expansion of Banca Sistema has involved complex legal activities, in particular at a corporate and regulatory level, which have been carried out with the limited support of external counsels. Pompeo highlights that this experience greatly strengthened his M&A skills. The legal department has with its five members, since 2011, managed on a completely autonomous basis, without recourse to external legal counsels for assistance on the core business of the Bank, like factoring. Pompeo has developed contractual models in line with market standard forms used by international law firms. The Bank’s legal department has managed complex negotiations with Italian and foreign counterparties such as big pharmaceutical firms (such as Roche and Johnson & Johnson) and utilities companies (such as Enel, ENI and Acea) which enable the bank to offer tailor made banking products to its customers. In addition to significant cost saving in external legal costs, Pompeo’s support has seen an increase in the annual factoring turnover from €100m, in 2011, to €2bn in 2017. Additionally, during Pompeo’s tenure he negotiated the listing of bank on the Milan Stock Exchange in 2015, the launch of listed and rated securitisation of salary loans asset backed securities for around €400m, and in October 2017 its first public bond issuing, a €175m denominated unsecured bond listed in the regulated market on the Irish Stock Exchange. On his approach to leadership and the root of his success Pompeo says that he has ‘adopted a trust based approach and tried to ensure that it could react to internal and external requests for advice on a prompt, cooperative and pragmatic manner adopting a risk based and business oriented approach’. After the conclusion of this research it was announced that Pompeo will undertake a new position starting in September 2018 at Arrow Global, as the company’s Italian group general counsel.