What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

HelloGold is the world’s first shariah compliant gold trading platform. When I joined the company, fintech was a relatively new industry without many expert lawyers with industry experience. The company was also about to embark on a growth path not only in terms of headcount but also in terms of entry into several key markets. I partnered with the business to steer the company through uncharted legal and business territory. I assisted HelloGold to scale the headquarters operations in Malaysia. In a span of about nine months the company grew from about 20 to about 80 employees. Also, during this period, I needed to engage with every part of the business to ensure that our final product was legally compliant in every aspect. Although we were not required to be licensed, in line with the goal of scaling as fast as possible, the recommended strategy was to behave as if we were a licensed entity and to put into place all the relevant policies and procedures so that when we did achieve our goal, we would have a strong foundation. This strategy paid off especially when we entered into regional markets.

The company did not have legal counsel for almost a year before I joined the team. In six months, I set up the legal, regulatory and compliance functions almost from scratch. I put in place policies and procedures, created the compliance manual, developed electronic databases, set up, built and grew the legal team to a team of three, managed the HR team and conducted training. More importantly, I facilitated the growth of the company by drafting, negotiating and closing critical partnership deals with large well-known entities such as GrabPay, Petronas, TNG, to name a few.

By the end of the year, HelloGold Thailand and UAE were incorporated and operational. And by the first quarter of the following year, HelloGold Indonesia was incorporated and ready for operations. I streamlined the legal and regulatory framework for the business model and fine-tuned the regulatory matrix. The regulatory matrix was used to conduct the regulatory review process in different jurisdictions. This sped up the process of regulatory review and consequently we were able to efficiently incorporate the respective entities and become operational quicker.

I have recently joined Zorion Technologies Malaysia as the chief legal officer and was appointed the head of APAC and a director of all the boards within the Zorion group (Malaysia, Labuan, Singapore, UK, Bahrain) within two months of my commencement date, in addition to my legal role. The appointment as head of APAC was a natural progression of my being heavily involved in the business side of matters, representing the company when dealing with regulatory bodies and being responsible for setting up the Malaysia office.

Zorion is an early-stage Fintech startup offering a first-of-its kind, cutting-edge financial product on its soon to be launched digital platform. Zorion is about democratizing wealth and financial inclusion by allowing retail investors to invest in shares in unicorn startup companies.

The ability to offer this product and commence operations hinged critically upon its ability to obtain the relevant capital markets licences in the jurisdictions it wished to operate in – which was my key deliverable. As a sole contributor working closely with the business teams, I conducted regulatory reviews, prepared the business plan and licence application in several jurisdictions, and have successfully obtained licences in Labuan and Bahrain to date. The successful attainment of the licences is crucial to the company’s ability to launch its app and commence operations which it is now gearing up to do.

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?

In my experience, I have found that simple low-cost digital innovations have made the world of difference in terms of improving the effectiveness of the legal team. For example, I created electronic templates of frequently used agreements such as, but not limited to NDAs, and letters of appointment and termination for HR use. I also created an electronic database that housed all the legal documents ranging from the above-mentioned templates to signed documents to work-in-progress. This not only encouraged transparency but also provided accessibility to the documents for the other teams in a controlled access manner. This significantly freed up the time of the lawyers in the legal team to concentrate on important, more urgent legal matters by reducing the time spent on administrative requests.

Another example is when I digitised an existing traditional record keeping process by creating a digital version of it instead. The existing process was to update a hardcopy ledger each time a document was signed. This was for record-keeping and auditing purposes. This ledger was updated by different departments and was kept in a central location. However, more often than not, the ledger would be nowhere to be found when an entry was required to be made. On multiple occasions, team members would have to scour the entire office to locate the missing ledger which would inadvertently be on someone’s desk instead of back where it was meant to be.

This was a cause of endless frustration for me as someone who needed to keep the ledger up to date. Having identified the problem, I created an electronic ledger using excel on Google Suite as a solution. This solved the problem, saved time and increased productivity as now there was no need to waste time looking for the ledger. There was some transition time for some team members to get used to the new electronic method, but it did not take long for them to see and appreciate the benefits.