Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/1238940
34 www.canadianlawyermag.com/inhouse DEPARTMENT PROFILE FAST FACTS: In operations for more than 20 years Nine facilities across Canada More than 2,000 employees Legal department has eight members Millions of dollars in capital investments has been made over the last two years to support digital transformation strategy Encourages employees to take paid volunteer time off to give back to their local communities AS THE WORLD becomes increasingly digitized and the demand for printed statements and cheque processing has declined, financial processing service provider Symcor has found new ways to remain a valued service provider for its clients. As a business-to-industry company, growth has been a major focus for Symcor in the past few years, and the legal department has played a significant role in supporting the growth strategy in three key ways: expanding current offerings, developing new service offerings and by acquiring other companies. "We identified this shift years ago as an executive team, so we've been proactively working to grow in areas that make sense, given what we already do, and expanding our offering to include brand new services," says Elisabeth Demone, vice president, chief legal officer and secretary. Symcor has been work- ing for years on digitizing and modernizing its offerings and developing brand new services to support the evolving needs of clients. "At Symcor, we are always working to accel- erate the digital transformation of our clients so the entire industry can shift," says Demone. The legal team has been heavily involved in digitizing the traditional cheque-processing and statement-processing services and mak- Supporting growth strategies Symcor's legal department plays crucial role in bolstering growth plans through M&A, new service offerings and existing services ing use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to help financial institution clients transition to the digital world. Demone sits on Symcor's executive growth committee together with a handful of other senior members of the executive team, so she can ensure that legal is represented in all ma- jor growth decisions. The committee meets bi-weekly to discuss and evaluate opportuni- ties for growth. Symcor's legal department has eight mem- bers, one of whom focuses entirely on growth, while Demone also focuses approximately 50 per cent of her time to growth strategies. When it comes to developing new products and services, Demone and her team work closely with Symcor's head of new product development. Demone led the legal team in assisting with the development of COR. IQ, an analytics and data services platform to help clients detect and predict fraud. The platform empowers organizations to prevent fraud through an alliance of Canadian finan- cial institutions, harnessing the strength of advanced analytics applied to cross-bank data and making use of dedicated product, fraud intelligence and data science resources. "The legal team helped build this product from the ground up in a way that made sense