With a background in complex legal matters and international finance, TENN’s new General Counsel discusses the frameworks that support confident global expansion while maintaining the firm’s agility.
You started your career in legal practice in South Africa before moving into the international finance space in Guernsey. How does that legal grounding support your approach to high-value lending?
That early legal experience encourages you to approach each transaction with a focus on clarity, structure and resilience from the outset. It’s about understanding how an agreement will operate in practice and ensuring it is robust, well-documented and aligned for all parties involved. No two situations are the same, and that aligns closely with TENN’s approach of assessing each deal on its own merits rather than forcing it into a template. I’d also say that a strong attention to detail, and maintaining a clear audit trail, helps ensure TENN’s documentation remains robust and dependable from day one.
What was it about the culture or business model at TENN that convinced you it was the right next step for your career?
The entrepreneurial spark and the opportunity to work in an environment where decisions are made quickly and confidently. Many lenders say no because a deal doesn’t fit into a box, but with TENN, the approach is always “how can we make this work”. This problem solving aspect, and the legal support required to get deals over the line, is highly engaging and interesting for a lawyer such as myself. The team was also a major draw, as well as the shared drive to grow the business internationally alongside offering more lending options to customers.
You’ve mentioned the desire to “institutionalise” legal frameworks at TENN. How do you further build those “guardrails” without slowing down the speed and flexibility the business is known for?
It’s about standardising routine documentation – by automating and refining 80% of the documentation that is standard, you free up bandwidth to focus on the 20% that is complex. It also requires proactive lawyering and being involved at the term sheet stage rather than just the closing stage as this helps to catch legal hurdles early in the process. The creation of a legal playbook then helps the deal teams to know exactly where the flexibility lies and where the hard limits are.
TENN often deals with HNW and UHNW clients. What are the specific legal complexities that arise when dealing with this demographic, particularly in cross-border transactions?
Jurisdictional nuance and navigating the interplay between Guernsey/Jersey/UK law and the laws of the jurisdictions where the asset or client is located. Structure transparency is another challenge, in particular, dealing with complex trust or corporate structures while maintaining the highest standards of governance and KYC.
In the current global financial climate, what do you see as the biggest legal or regulatory hurdles for short-term, high-value lenders over the next 12-24 months?
Increasing disclosure requirements and staying ahead of global shifts in transparency and reporting. Then there’s economic volatility, which increases the importance of robust security packages that can withstand market fluctuations. Finally, consistency – as TENN grows, we must maintain the same high legal standards across different regulatory environments.
From a legal perspective, what does “bespoke lending” actually look like in practice compared to the “standard products” offered by larger, more rigid institutions?
Standard products are “tick box” while bespoke lending requires a deep dive into the why and how of a transaction – in short, it requires intellectual rigor. Instead of blanket high risk labels, we look at the specific legal mitigants that can make a complex deal safe for all parties. This means the legal conversation with the client’s counsel is not a “take it or leave it” ultimatum, rather a transparent discussion about how best to get the deal over the line quickly, compliantly and satisfactorily for all involved. This makes bespoke lending relationship-driven more than anything else.
As TENN expands into new products and jurisdictions, how will the legal function evolve to support that growth?
It will move from one-off manual processes to a centralised legal hub that can support multiple locations, offices and products. I will also be exploring how legal-tech can help speed up document generation and condition-precedent tracking alongside making myself a legal sounding board for the team – this will transition the role from purely legal to strategic, advising on new market entries, products and more.
Looking back a year from now, what would “success” look like for you in your new role as General Counsel?
Turning the legal function into a seamless machine that’s viewed by the team as an accelerator, not a bottleneck. I’d also like to have institutional-grade frameworks in place that allow TENN to take on even larger, more complex deals. This will allow TENN to enjoy rapid expansion with zero preventable legal friction.