Team size: Four

What are the key projects you have been involved in over the past twelve months?

I led a project to catalogue and streamline all of our product lines and operating models. As CLO, I had the broadest view of these models, having overseen and designed their legal and compliance requirements. It became clear that maintaining multiple operating models for the same product line was creating unnecessary delays to go-live and revenue generation, as legal and compliance reviews were more complex than they needed to be. I worked across the business to catalogue every offering before partnering with the leadership and commercial teams to reduce them to the models that were both profitable and most in demand. Once agreed, I collaborated with compliance, finance and technical teams to document the requirements for each model, creating a single reference guide for implementation. This has improved conversations with clients and prospects, reduced unnecessary compliance work and cut the time from commercial agreement to go-live by more than 20%.

We launched our Volt Accounts product this year and, with support from my team, I led the preparation of the legal framework following the grant of the necessary licences in the UK and EU. This included drafting B2B and end-user terms and ensuring legal and compliance requirements were documented and embedded across both markets. Our work enabled the product to launch on schedule and in a fully compliant manner.

I also oversaw the work undertaken by our in-house regulatory counsel to obtain Identified Institution status on Australia’s New Payments Platform (granted in February) and submit an application for an AFSL licence to enable Volt to expand its product offering in Australia (pending).

Please provide a brief description of any internal transformation/development projects within your legal team over the last twelve months.

As the business entered a steady growth phase and legal could become more pro-active rather than reactive, as previously while the business was consistently expanding, I took the opportunity to review and revise our governance processes. I streamlined local board structures and processes to ensure regular interaction with group board and consistent processes and standards across our global entities. I also formed board remuneration, nominee and ESG committees to sit alongside our risk committee, further strengthening our global standards. This has ensured quicker, more consistent decision making, ensuring our exec team and board have oversight across all key decisions.

We also automated the process for requesting legal support by building a Slackbot that enables the business to submit queries centrally via Slack. Requests are automatically allocated to the appropriate team member based on criteria such as subject matter or document type. Through our Jira board, I have visibility of all requests, allowing me to monitor team capacity and track progress. In addition, we integrated Ironclad with Salesforce, enabling commercial team members to generate tailored contract documents directly from a Salesforce opportunity by answering a series of questions. This has significantly reduced contract turnaround times, accelerated issue resolution and improved the allocation of work across the legal team.

How do you use AI within your legal team to improve efficiency while maintaining quality, governance and integrity? How do you think AI will impact in-house legal functions more widely?

Throughout my time as CLO, I have focused on using technology to make the legal function more efficient and scalable, allowing the team to spend more time on complex advice and strategic decision-making. I have already automated much of how legal support is delivered as set out above, and I have encouraged my team to use AI to accelerate research, summarise complex documents, compare contractual provisions and produce first drafts.

We only use AI tools that are approved by legal, compliance and infosec, with a clear contract ensuring that data is not leaking to the tool (e.g. for AI training) or elsewhere. We also have clear guidance on acceptable use, including restrictions on using AI with personal data and company confidential information. Additionally, we require AI output to be reviewed in full by a team member before it is shared to ensure legal judgement and accountability remains with my team.

I believe AI will transform in-house legal functions by improving consistency as much as efficiency. The greatest opportunity is not simply to do legal work faster, but to apply institutional knowledge more consistently. For example, a paralegal or junior team member can have months of precedents from more senior team members at their fingertips instantly to understand how they responded to a client’s redline. It also frees up legal advisors to undertake more strategic work, as the AI, once trained, can carry out simple document generation and first line reviews, freeing up valuable time.

With increasing regulatory complexity across jurisdictions, how do you embed compliance across the business?

As the business has grown internationally, my focus has been on embedding compliance into day-to-day operations, rather than treating it as a checkpoint at the end of a project. It should be easy for our colleagues to do the right thing than to bypass the process, we do not want to be seen as a checkpoint or a blocker, but instead an integral part of the process to getting something live. I encourage my team to be visible business partners through regular drop-in sessions and close collaboration with product and commercial teams from the outset of new initiatives. I am also exploring a network of compliance champions across the business to help embed ownership within each function rather than relying solely on the legal team. I have found that pushing out short, snappy videos on hot compliance topics is more effective than longer training sessions, and they can even be generated quickly from slides using Google NotebookLM.

In which areas does compliance most commonly break down, and how do you address these risks?

Compliance usually breaks down where it is seen as a blocker to progress or moving at speed. The key risks arise when commercial pressure outpaces legal input, where there are no consistent standards across the organisation and where ownership of compliance decisions is unclear, which usually leads to bad decision making. I have addressed this by embedding compliance into operating design rather than treating it as a review function. Legal and compliance should form a core part of the product team from the inception of the product. Compliance standards should be clear and easy to follow, with team members embedded within the project on hand to address any unintentional ambiguity. An example of how this can be mitigated is the project I led to streamline our product and operating models (as described above), which has enabled faster, more consistent decision-making. Overall, my approach is to remove opportunities for compliance failure by design, by ensuring clarity and good governance structures to enable good decision making and to ensure that Legal and Compliance are seen as partners, not blockers.

Beyond your legal role, is there a cause or initiative you are especially passionate about?

Beyond my legal role, I am passionate about guinea pig welfare. I have had guinea pigs as pets since I was a child, and over time this has turned into a long-standing interest in their care and husbandry. I run an Instagram account dedicated to promoting good guinea pig welfare, where I share practical guidance on proper care — from the importance of unlimited hay and a balanced diet (not just the occasional lettuce leaf) to safe housing and enrichment. The aim is to make good-quality information more accessible and to gently challenge some of the less helpful myths that circulate online.