UK digital banking group Starling’s group general counsel Monica Risam has just celebrated her first anniversary with the organisation following earlier GC spells at Lombard International Group, Aviva and GE Capital. Global Legal Post spoke to Monica about her role, the development of Starling’s first legal panel and the evolving role of in-house lawyers.
What are your key responsibilities as GC at Starling?
Starling as a group has three businesses: Starling Bank, Engine by Starling, which is our software as a service business, and Fleet, which is a mortgage business. So as group GC I have overall responsibility for legal, regulatory affairs and data privacy. Firstly, I’m accountable for the legal health of the business, making sure that our commercial arrangements, our products and our corporate activities are properly structured, that we identify risks early, and that the board and executive committee receive clear commercial advice and not abstract legal theory. Secondly, my regulatory affairs team leads our engagement with our key regulators. That’s not a back-office function; it really shapes our strategy, our product roadmap, our culture and our regulatory engagement. My team works really hard to ensure that that relationship with the regulators is open, credible and constructive. Thirdly, we own data privacy at a group level. Given that we’re a bank, we handle significant volumes of personal and financial data, so getting data protection right is fundamental to customer trust and our licence to operate.
Underpinning all of that is our responsibility for how we resource legal work, including how we instruct and manage external counsel through our panel arrangements, and making sure that we’ve got an in-house legal team that’s genuinely embedded in the business as a legal risk partner. That is paramount and sits at the core of how we operate within Starling.
How is your legal department structured?
Legal, regulatory and data privacy all have team leads, and there’s a general counsel for Engine and for Fleet. How we structured the legal team was really to mirror how the business operates. At the group level, we have centres of excellence for employment, commercial contracts and corporate matters, and then we have a banking product team that supports Starling Bank. Engine and Fleet each have their own legal teams. Our group legal team covers all commercial and technology contracting, lending products, corporate matters, employment, litigation disputes and so on. The regulatory affairs team manages our interaction with the regulators, really focusing on horizon scanning and regulatory change. And then our DPO (data privacy officer) sits in our data privacy team, and they focus on making sure we’ve got the right data protection impact assessments and that cross-border data flows are being monitored.
We really operate as embedded partners within the business rather than as a remote advisory function, and that’s something I’ve always been very passionate about in terms of the role of an in-house lawyer. Lawyers have to be aligned to the business areas to make sure that they understand the commercial contexts in which the business needs to operate, and that we have specialist capability pooled so they can be leveraged across the business as needed from the centres of excellence. Where we have work that might be more specialist or jurisdiction-specific, or might need additional capacity or support, we’ll use external counsel through our panel. That means we keep a lean, high-quality in-house team while accessing support when we need it.
You just assembled your first legal panel at Starling – how did you manage that process?
When I joined Starling, I realised that the use of external counsel had been rather ad hoc and not very structured. Having a panel in place is something that I did at my previous companies, Aviva and Lombard, with good success rates. At Starling, we firstly needed to collate which firms we had been using, and then once we had that data and in the spirit of fairness, we wrote out to every firm to invite them to tender for our panel. Through this RFP process, we asked the firms to demonstrate their understanding of Starling, our strategy and our needs, and also what they could provide us in terms of, not just creative legal fee arrangements, but also value add. I see a panel as something that is really a partnership with a law firm. There’s a need for us to invest in helping them understand our strategy, but also for them to invest in growing the relationship with us.
So we went ahead and created the panel through a structured selection process, and we included our key stakeholders internally in that – for example, the strategy team and the tax team, because they need to be users of these panel law firms as well. We really were looking for a combination of factors. Genuine sector expertise in financial services and an understanding of the needs for a regulated digital bank were a baseline. And then on top of that, there was also what I consider the ‘X factor’ – assessing the individuals who would actually work with us. We want to work with firms and people who we believe truly want to work with us and will invest the time in getting to know our team and understanding Starling.
Obviously, we expect them to be responsive, commercial and transparent on their pricing. And then also cultural fit was very important to us. We’re the first female-founded UK bank, so diversity and inclusion are core to our values, and we want to work with firms that understand that mindset. We have 16 firms in total on the panel, and we’ve set the panel up for three years. After the first year, we’ll do a quick review to make sure that it’s working well on both sides and that we’re leveraging the firms in the right way.
What are your legal team’s key operational priorities over the coming year?
Starling itself has a very detailed strategy of what we want to achieve. We’re in our fifth year of profitability and the focus of the business is to responsibly grow revenue, but also keep an eye on costs, so we have to support that. My team’s operational priorities are to help the business grow responsibly and manage its risks, and then on a more functional level, a priority is to continue to mature how our legal function operates – making the right use of technology and making sure that we’re using AI with the right governance. So our operational priorities are very much aligned to Starling’s strategic priorities.
What are the key legal and regulatory issues impacting the UK banking sector right now?
The dominant issues are financial crime and fraud, embedding consumer duty, operational resilience, prudential reform and AI governance. Financial crime remains the sharpest area of supervisory and enforcement focus, so for Starling, that means making sure that we continue to have the right focus and the regulators are comfortable that we have our arms around those risks. That is more in the risk and compliance function, but obviously legal are subject matter experts to support as needed on that. Consumer duty is very important. That’s moving from implementation to supervision, and the regulators have an expectation that that’s measured with good outcomes and fair value, not just technical compliance. There’s also a growing attention to third-party dependencies, so my commercial outsourcing team will have an eye on that.
What do you believe are the most important qualities for an in-house lawyer today?
My mindset on that really comes from being an American lawyer with my first in-house job – after being in private practice at Weil Gotshal – at GE Capital, which back then was one of the best companies in the world and one of the original NYSE-listed companies. The mindset at GE was really partnership with the business, you’re there to be embedded with them from day one, so for me, commerciality comes first. As in-house lawyers, we have to understand the business and the commercial objectives so we can frame our advice around enabling good decisions, not simply listing risks. I’m often in situations where the most valuable answer isn’t yes or no, but rather how we can do this safely if there is a route forward.
That advisory role in the UK is becoming much more embedded than it was 20 years ago when I first went in-house, and so I continually coach, mentor and support my team in following that approach with the business as well. Sound judgement is also critical. We have to be pragmatic without compromising on the things that genuinely matter, and also have the courage to give sometimes difficult advice when needed to our senior stakeholders.
How do you see the remit of in-house legal teams changing in the future?
Technology will affect how we work. Routine drafting and knowledge tasks can increasingly be supported by AI and automation. That is the case within Starling, both in terms of what’s embedded within our own infrastructure, and we’ve also recently set up a partnership with an AI legal-focused tool to help our team. The idea being it frees up the lawyers to spend more time on where they truly add value on judgement and strategy, because AI can’t do that.
As a profession, legal can often be slower to change, but we must embrace it and make use of it in the right way, and with the right controls. We’re being expected to do more and more as a legal team – we have to be proactive, we have to do horizon scanning, anticipating change, helping shape strategy early, etcetera – and that focus will only continue to grow, so we have to be more thoughtful and clever about how we resource the work we’re doing. So the in-house lawyer of the future is less of a technician and more a trusted adviser to the business while using these tools to help them juggle that with day-to-day legal work.
If you hadn’t pursued a career in law, what would you have done instead?
I’m Indian and my parents are both doctors, who expected me to follow them into medicine too. I started university pre-med, but I shocked my parents when I told them I wanted to be a lawyer and go to law school. They’re finally over it, but it took a while! My parents became doctors to be of service to others and help people, core values and ethics which have shaped me and how I operate as a GC. I am committed to mentoring and empowering others and also give a lot of my free time to the non-profit sector, serving on the board of trustees of the Royal British Legion and the finance and investment committee of the Elton John AIDS Foundation. This is a reflection of the values my parents instilled in me – so even though I didn’t become a doctor, I have tried to reflect the same commitment to service and helping others in my own legal career.
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