About

As general counsel and first executive vice president of Bank of Ayudhya, Phawana Niemloy heads one of the largest legal functions in Southeast Asia, comprising approximately 240 lawyers, and has established a reputation as one of the best in-house counsel in the region due to her excellent performance at her current company with its precursor GE Capital Thailand from 1996. She lists the three main highlights of her career as her collaboration with Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers to secure auto hire purchase portfolio from the Financial Restructuring Authority of Thailand, her prominent role in the deal team for the acquisition of GE Capital Auto Lease Thailand from GE Capital for Bank of Ayudhya in a deal worth US$1.4bn and her position as a crucial team member of the Bank of Ayudhya team which finalised the sale and acquisition of shares between GE Capital and MUFG Bank. In the latter, she explains that she ‘worked with regulators including the Bank of Thailand and the Minister of Finance to facilitate the timely approval of the share acquisition in a deal worth US$5.6bn’. When discussing the broader role of in-house legal departments in general, Niemloy believes that ‘legal should not be a second or third line of defence and should rather be a business partner’. As such, she encourages her team to be as involved as possible in the commercial side of the business and understand its operating mechanisms: ‘Legal challenges the business to involve us from product design and development and work together to get it through regulatory approval as versus being an end-product consultation. By being involved in the product development and regarded as a part of the business team, legal can provide more added legal advice and in most instance, shortens the development process to only products which is possible under regulatory limitations’.