About

Yapı Kredi operates with an in-house legal department of 118 lawyers and 56 non-lawyers reporting to Cemal Aybars Sanal, the bank’s deputy CEO for legal affairs. Due to its size, broad skill set and structure, the legal team is well equipped to support the bank’s decisions in diverse areas of the law such as competition law, corporate law and project finance. Serving their business colleagues in an extremely involved way, the legal team ensure that nearly all strategic steps in senior management are taken in collaboration with and under the advice of legal staff. Much of the team’s work in the recent past has been in preparation for the drastic changes in the market regulatory framework. During this time, with the contributions of the legal team, practical legal solutions to various problems have been prepared for immediate compliance. The bank’s proactive approach in this matter, to which the legal team was the leading contributor, helped strengthen its position in the market. Although communication flows of the bank’s business units are segregated, all units are located in the same working environment and make efforts to constantly exchange critical information on any issue they encounter. Cemal Aybars Sanal explains that this method of working ‘not only creates a lively and informative environment but also ensures triple, sometimes quadruple checks by different peers and ensures harmony between the legal practices within the bank’. The bank’s activities were deeply affected by recent shifts in the Turkish regulatory framework that saw changes in major landmark laws such as Code of Obligations and Commercial Code, both of which conspired to affect the business of Yapı Kredi. Harmonisation attempts with the EU have resulted in the change of existing and/or the adoption of new regulations. The legal team’s biggest challenge was to study the evolution of such codes before their inception and provide cohesion within the bank’s various departments during the implementation of these changes. Sanal says that ‘our legal team is distinguished from an ordinary in-house team where the duties are clear cut, our team’s structure assures full compliance and enables us to create solutions from which our customers and internal departments can benefit’.