Team size: Six

Major legal advisors: We use several law firms in Portugal on a non-exclusive basis from transactional firms to litigation firms.

Jurisdictions your role covers: Portugal and Spain

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

As usual recent times have been interesting. The most recent transactions relate to new activities and products marketed by the Bank relate to insurance products marketed as optional products to the Bank’s credit products. More importantly a thorough review of products was performed not only to improve its quality but also the suitability and coverages offered to clients. This aspect is sometimes less thought of when this is considered but it’s a major concern from the regulatory side.

In addition, during the last year a more focused analysis was made on technological and digital aspects following growing concerns from our Group and the related aspects to technology and its precise implications. Moreover, we’ve worked a lot on reframing some aspects relating to the distribution of existing products and improvements where documentation and ease of understanding of these documents is concerned.

What factors influence your team’s decision to use external legal services versus handling matters in-house, and what criteria are used to evaluate their performance?

It’s a question that goes to the core of the Head of Legal’s mind every day. The best way is to build a solid triage skill and be able to juggle several issues at the same time. A good way is to relate to other similar tasks, have they been made and if so how. Can we recycle the existing knowledge database to give a good answer to this issue, or a new and in-depth analysis is required. If such is the case how does this task relate in the order of existing priorities in the company. In short you build a decision model that allows for time, priority vs cost which seems simple but in the “haze of battle” is always much more complex and time consuming.

As for performance evaluation we find that the best criteria is the ability to move or close the matter at hand without further inputs or fine tuning from the external legal team.

What are some of the biggest legal or regulatory challenges currently facing your industry, and how is your team preparing to address them?

As an entity that operates in the consumer finance market in Portugal, we find that one of the most important challenges is the proliferation of new players that force more traditional entities to be on their toes. Take for instance the “buy now and pay later” segment that has emerged throughout the EU and the different regulatory approaches that they entail at this.

We hope that this will be sorted out eventually due to the new Consumer Credit Directive and its adoption at the EU level but we find that we’re not competing with locally based entities but also others that are nested in some digital platforms, enabling these to offer very interesting credit products with lowered regulatory requirements. A good way to prepare is to participate in consumer associations and other forums giving some advice and information on some of the loopholes and grey areas on the existing markets. Nevertheless, kudos to these entities that can keep more traditional players on their toes always.