The practice of law is often defined by the rules that govern it, but its greatest impact can be found in how those rules shape real-world decisions. For Paola Acevedo, the legal profession provided an opportunity to explore this relationship. It gave her a deeper understanding of how institutions evolve, how companies are built, and how regulation can drive meaningful change. As Legal Vice President at a fintech company in Colombia, she did not enter the legal profession for conventional reasons. Instead, she was drawn to the intersection of institutions, business, regulation, and individuals. Financial services became a natural fit because regulation can influence economic growth, promote innovation, strengthen competition, and build public trust.
More than 14 years of professional experience in financial, corporate, and banking law have reinforced this perspective. Her practice focuses extensively on fintech and financial services regulation. Today, she works on strategic legal matters involving innovative financial products. This approach is grounded in broad industry experience. Having worked across different areas of the financial sector, she understands how regulation, business, technology, and customer needs intersect in practice.
A Broad Financial Perspective
Paola’s career reflects a broad understanding of the financial ecosystem. She has worked at Banco de la República de Colombia, the Superintendencia Financiera de Colombia, Scotiabank, EY, and Nu. These institutions have given her experience across central banking, financial supervision, traditional banking, professional services, and fintech.
Each experience has shaped Paola’s professional perspective. Her work with financial regulators helped her understand how supervisory authorities assess risk and interpret regulations. It also taught her to look beyond the wording of a rule and understand its purpose. She learned to consider the risks a regulation addresses, the behavior it seeks to encourage, and its role in protecting the stability and credibility of the financial system.
Her background in banking and professional services strengthened her understanding of risk management and corporate governance. Her work in fintech provided another perspective. She saw how technology-driven companies are challenging traditional financial models. She also gained insight into how regulations become part of daily operations through products, customer journeys, contracts, and internal controls.
This broad perspective now influences how Paola approaches professional decisions. She approaches legal matters from a broader perspective that considers both legal requirements and their wider business implications. She considers the regulatory environment, business model, customer needs, technology, risk framework, and long-term impact on the institution. For Paola, technical expertise is essential. However, she believes meaningful impact also requires sound judgment, business understanding, anticipation, and the ability to align different stakeholders around a common objective. “Clarity gives people the confidence to make decisions and move forward,” she says.
Enabling Responsible Innovation
For Paola, regulatory discipline and innovation do not have to work against each other. She believes sustainable speed comes from transparency and clarity. This includes clear governance, early identification of regulatory requirements, defined decision rights, and frameworks that allow teams to innovate with confidence within established boundaries. Early involvement enables her team to understand the customer journey, business objectives, and technology. This helps the team identify regulatory requirements and develop practical solutions.
She views a key part of her role as connecting teams and aligning different perspectives. Each function approaches a project with its own priorities. Product focuses on customer experience. Business focuses on growth. Technology focuses on execution. Risk and Compliance focus on controls. Legal focuses on the regulatory framework. Effective legal leadership brings these perspectives together and helps teams work toward a common objective.
To support efficient decision-making, Paola relies on scalable frameworks. These include clear decision rights, approval thresholds, standard positions, escalation criteria, and defined ownership. This approach gives teams the autonomy to move forward while ensuring that significant matters receive appropriate review and oversight.
Education as a Fintech Driver
When asked about the biggest challenge facing fintech innovation, Paola points to financial education. She considers it one of the most underestimated issues in the industry. Companies can develop increasingly sophisticated digital products, but innovation creates lasting value only when customers understand how those products work. They also need to trust the institution behind them and have the knowledge to make informed financial decisions.
For Paola, the challenge extends beyond compliance. She believes innovation should be easy for customers to understand. Product design, disclosures, customer communications, and financial education should work together to support this goal.
She also takes a broad view of financial inclusion. Providing someone with access to a financial account is only the beginning. True inclusion means helping customers understand financial products, make informed decisions, and use financial services in ways that can improve their lives. “Financial inclusion begins with access, but its real value comes through understanding,” she says.
Navigating Regulatory Change
Regulation is constantly evolving, and Paola believes leaders should prepare for change rather than wait for new requirements to take effect. She believes one of the best ways to anticipate change is to engage in discussions before a new rule becomes a deadline. This requires monitoring regulatory developments and understanding how authorities view changes in markets, technology, competition, innovation, and consumer protection.
Industry associations also play an important role. In Colombia, Paola highlights organizations such as Colombia Fintech, which provide platforms for discussions on public policy, regulation, innovation, and financial inclusion.
For Paola, legal leaders must understand both current regulations and the direction in which the regulatory environment is moving. Her approach combines horizon scanning, active participation in relevant discussions, scenario planning, and disciplined implementation. This helps businesses adapt strategically and respond to regulatory change with greater confidence.
Governance with Clarity
Effective corporate governance is not about adding layers of control. It is about creating the clarity needed for better and faster decisions. Her experience suggests otherwise. Organizations often slow down when decision-making becomes unclear. Multiple people may feel responsible for approving the same matter. Management may be uncertain about what requires escalation. Boards may spend too much time on operational issues instead of strategic matters. Committees can also become additional layers rather than sources of expertise.
She believes Legal can address these challenges without adding unnecessary bureaucracy. Legal leaders can help design clear decision-making structures that define decision rights, materiality and risk thresholds, delegations of authority, and escalation criteria. With these structures in place, management gains greater autonomy, while the Board can focus on matters where its judgment provides the greatest value.
She also advocates for boards to spend less time reviewing past events and more time discussing what lies ahead. This includes strategy, emerging risks, technology, new business models, capital allocation, and regulatory change.
An effective governance framework should clearly define who can make decisions, the limits of that authority, when an issue requires escalation, and what information is needed. In financial services, innovation must operate alongside prudential discipline and consumer protection. Clear governance gives organizations the confidence to make decisions and move forward efficiently.
Technology-Enabled Legal Leadership
Paola considers technical excellence essential, but it is no longer enough. She expects the next generation of General Counsel to be technology-oriented, commercially aware, and comfortable working across different disciplines. Legal leaders must understand regulation while also being able to engage with AI, data, cybersecurity, and digital business models.
Legal departments must evolve as well. AI and automation can support repetitive tasks such as research, contract processes, regulatory monitoring, and document analysis. This allows lawyers to focus on areas where human judgment is most valuable. These include shaping decisions, negotiating, identifying opportunities, and challenging business strategies.
Technology also creates new risks. These include privacy, cybersecurity, intellectual property, ,among others. These concerns are especially important in financial services because technology can directly affect customers.
Innovation cannot be managed through prohibition alone. Legal teams should help develop responsible-use frameworks with clear ownership, appropriate human oversight, testing, monitoring, and escalation processes. The approach is simple: Technology should not replace human judgment. It should give professionals more time to focus on decisions that require it.
Human-Centered Leadership
Being highly skilled at her work taught Paola that technical excellence alone does not create influence. Women moving into senior roles also need to understand how organizations make decisions. They must build credibility beyond technical expertise, communicate with confidence, negotiate effectively, and make their perspectives heard when it matters. Leadership requires taking ownership and using the opportunities that come with earned responsibility.
This lesson also shapes her approach to mentoring. Throughout her career, she has naturally become colleagues, particularly women, turn to for guidance on professional growth, leadership challenges and navigating increasingly senior responsibilities. She encourages them to pursue technical excellence while also developing business knowledge, strategic judgment and the confidence to contribute beyond their formal responsibilities. Authority and empathy can coexist, just as ambition and collaboration can.
“Leadership means taking ownership of the space you have earned, while also helping others grow into theirs,” she says.
Her additional experience in coaching has complemented this approach. It has strengthened her ability to listen carefully, understand the concerns and assumptions behind different positions, and navigate complex conversations with empathy and clarity — skills that are equally valuable when working with business leaders, boards and regulators.
For Paola, empathy does not mean lowering standards or avoiding difficult conversations. It means understanding different perspectives while maintaining accountability, providing direct feedback and knowing when to challenge, when to ask better questions and when to remain firm.
She sees the same principle in effective risk management. Strong risk cultures are not defined by the number of policies an organization has, but by whether people take responsibility, raise concerns early, challenge ideas constructively and address mistakes before they become larger problems. A clear sense of purpose matters as well: people contribute differently when they understand not only what they are responsible for, but why it matters.
Redefining the Role of Legal Leadership
Looking ahead, Paola wants to redefine the role of Legal within an organization. For many years, Legal has been viewed as the function that tells the business what it cannot do. She wants her teams to be known for something different. They should understand the business objectives, identify the key risks, and help develop the safest and most effective path forward.
This does not mean agreeing to every proposal. Some strategies may involve unacceptable risks, and Legal must clearly communicate those concerns. However, the discussion should not end with a simple refusal. A strong legal function explains the constraint, understands the underlying business objective, and proposes alternative solutions whenever possible. Paola wants business teams to involve Legal because they expect practical solutions rather than additional obstacles.
To achieve this, lawyers need to understand more than the law. They must understand the product, customer, technology, economics, and strategy behind each decision. Paola sees Legal as a bridge between business ambition and responsible execution. This approach can help organizations innovate with discipline, move efficiently while maintaining appropriate controls, and pursue growth without compromising trust.
Her desired legacy is to develop a generation of legal leaders who contribute to building their organizations as well as protecting them. For Paola, legal excellence is achieved when the business views Legal as a strategic partner that helps find a clear and responsible path forward. “Legal excellence is measured by the value it brings to business decisions,” she says.
