Team size: Three
  
What are the most significant cases and/or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Completing the sale of Monevo from Quint Group to TransUnion last April was a key transaction for our team; enabling Quint to realise the full value of its investment in Monevo and position Monevo for growth in a listed organisation.

I’d only recently joined the business as the transaction was shaping up, it was a fantastic opportunity to jump in at the deep-end with new colleagues and show how a small in-house legal team can deliver on complex M&A; together we co-ordinated the legal, regulatory, and compliance aspects and maintained business-as-usual legal support for the rest of the group.

Our team supports Quint Group as a holding company and its portfolio of fintech subsidiaries (Acquired, Cred, Credit Technologies and Infinian); B2B, B2C, regulated and non-regulated businesses across payments, data and credit. Since the Monevo sale, we’ve been positioning these subsidiaries for growth and investment which has seen the team involved across a range of corporate, regulatory and commercial matters, including the design and launch of an innovative group employee incentive scheme.
  
What do you see as an opportunity or risk over the next six months? 

For fintechs its the constant tension between product innovation and the regulatory perimeter, both opportunity and risk. We see this play out in real time as the businesses explore new markets and product delivery methods; its not always immediately clear if activities fall within permission categories or use cases. An example of this is open banking, just this morning I’ve been asked to interpret whether an opportunity falls within a wave 1 use case for cVRPs.
  
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?  

I am passionate about our team having a ‘legal as a product’ mindset, it’s a shift from legal being a reactive function to legal being a designed product. We focus on delivering repeatable solutions that can be deployed, re-iterated and scaled across the group.

Our flagship innovation is PRIA, our Policy & Regulatory Intelligence Assistant, multi-agentic AI deployed via Slack. Each agent solves a specific use case.  Having made the investment in the AI platform for contracts and playbooks, the platform had already delivered ROI. Our legal as a product approach meant we saw the value beyond.

Our first agent wasn’t a use-case we’d envisaged applying AI to; a financial promotions approval workflow, risk assessment, built-in compliance checks and audit trail. We swiftly followed-up with additional agents covering first line contracts and policy support, horizon scanning, compliance monitoring and a primary triage interface.

A simpler example of this approach is our Quint Contracts Bank, a central contracts repository, supported by a Contract Champions initiative giving business-unit champions an opportunity to develop contract expertise and drive local adoption. We’ve redesigned our contracts training to be more user-friendly also. These initiatives improve engagement, deliver consistency and don’t require significant investment.

General counsel often speak of the need to be strategic to reach the pinnacle of the profession. What does being strategic mean to you?   

My approach to strategy comes from the perspective of my own career journey. My career started in the late 90’s when the in-house role was still establishing an identity, I was part of a wave of lawyers in the 00’s experimenting with using social media to best effect, and I spent a decade building legal tech products before coming back in-house supporting growing fintechs. Watching the evolution of the in-house role and the power of tech over that time has really shaped how I think about legal as a product. Strategy is just as much about operational design as it is about legal and commercial advice.