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which makes it hard to attract the right people and keep them.
one needs to appreciate that we are not the regulator, we are only interpreting the law. So what we understand and explain may not necessarily be exactly what the regulator intended: we will only know with time. Things change so quickly, and always the question is ‘how does this affect our position,’ and you’re expected to give an answer. SP: Many IMGL members provide external counsel to people in your in-house position. Do you rely on third-party counsel and what can they do to support you better? CV : External counsel means different things in different markets. In markets where we don’t have a local license, they are the only way to get representation with the regulator. But in many cases, they are a sounding board. I talk through ideas and try to understand whether we are on the right track, especially with difficult decisions. I am happy with most of the support we get, although sometimes it feels like they take on too much and can’t be as quick as we need them to be. One week for a legal opinion is too slow: the business reality is much quicker than that. SP: You mentioned your expansion in LatAm. That feels quite a long way away from Betsson’s ownership roots in Scandinavia. How did that come about? CV: : South America is interesting for us because we have had good success in the early days and achieved some strong brand recognition. We acquired a company in Brazil in 2019 and another in Colombia in 2020. The recent law in Peru is very interesting for us, and we have been closely following the developments there. Argentina started to open up in 2018, and now we have three licenses there. From a legal and compliance perspective, the challenges in South America are numerous. Regulators are often younger and sometimes more prepared to listen, but sometimes they
SP: Once you have recruited the team, what are the challenges then? CV: Then it’s about setting them up with the right tools and strategies to get the work done properly. We have to have people from different countries owing to the language requirements of our various licensing jurisdictions, which means you have a melting pot of lots of different cultures and characters. Then I am managing people with very different career backgrounds to me. There are so many different skill sets required even just within the legal and compliance team. There are all areas of law, from regulatory to commercial, and corporate to M&A, as well as litigation and banking. Then there are people with a background in technical audits and data, security, business, or general compliance. It is really challenging when you’re the boss and you have no academic qualifications in some of the areas you are managing – it means you need to constantly test to make sure you have found the right people to help you arrive at the solutions the business needs. SP: You mentioned having to be across lots of different aspects of law. That’s a huge brief when you’re in so many countries, especially in Latin America. CV: It’s not even the law itself but the speed at which things change. Practically every day something changes somewhere that affects the plans or operations of the business. Management expectations are that we can give an immediate interpretation, which would be unheard of outside our industry. We are expected to be on top of regulatory developments in real time. So there’s a new framework being introduced in Brazil at the moment, and the team is working through it to understand and provide its interpretation on how we can implement it. The business is only interested in how long that is going to take, and
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IMGL MAGAZINE | SEPTEMBER 2024
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