Could you provide a brief journey of how you arrived where you are today?
As a lawyer, I started in New York at a major securitization practice, back when this word conjured the leading edge of technical finance rather than fraudulent financial alchemy. I was fortunate to work in New York and later London with the leading securitization practices and arguably the index securitization lawyer in each place.
I first came to Asia in 1999 and later joined Allen & Overy in 2001. My practice became much broader than securitization in scope but still focused on capital markets. At university in the US, I had found early Islamic history fascinating, which led me to read in Islamic law purely for interest. I hardly expected that in a few years international finance would witness a revitalization of and intersection with Islamic commercial law. But that is what has been happening, and in 2002 I found myself working on the Malaysian and Qatari sovereign Sukuk, drafting the original set of cross-border Sukuk contracts.
Islamic finance weaves together my interest in Islamic law and history, my inclination towards structured and technical deals, and the excitement and possibilities of working during the foundational period of a major development in finance. I wouldn’t have guessed these things could coexist, but here we are.
What does your role involve?
I have a broad capital markets practice which in addition to Islamic finance includes debt, equity, securitization and US securities work. In Islamic finance, I look after our practice in East Asia, handling some of the deals myself. Because the modern incarnation of Islamic finance is still in its early years, a fair bit of my time in that area is spent working with bankers, borrowers, governments and various domestic counsel in considering what’s possible.
What is your greatest achievement to date?
Well, in absolute and not just professional terms, it would be convincing my wife to marry me, and then, fittingly, orchestrating a conventional and a Shariah compliant marriage. Notwithstanding the general view that Islamic transactions are harder to do, I can report to you that while the Islamic marriage was a walk in the park, the conventional one was fraught with legal complexities and multi-jurisdictional maneuvers (it did not help that we decided to do it in Mexico on a weekend on the last day of the year with the entire judiciary on vacation and our papers without the preferred amount of sealing wax).
What are the strengths of your business?
Allen & Overy’s greatest strength is perhaps a pervasive attitude running throughout the organization of focusing on clients and holding their interests paramount. Everything else flows from that. There are of course other indispensable strengths — deep presence in major business and financial centers, top quality people who generally enjoy working together and have a distinct common culture — but it is the client focus which takes the potential of the other strengths and turns them into something distinct and valued.
What are the factors contributing to the success of your company?
Client focus, geographical reach, the best people, a shared culture. Beyond those, a major external factor is the firm’s reputation, which of course is owed to a record of great client service. People view us as being able to handle the most difficult and consequential of transactions and respond to a changing legal environment with timely, decisive advice.
What are the obstacles faced in running your business today?
I see challenges more than obstacles. In this time of change, a primary challenge is to stay relevant and valuable when the clients, markets and products are all changing. At the same time, efficiency and cost containment are at the forefront of clients’ minds, and we must respond. So we must navigate all these changes while becoming more efficient. That’s quite testing.
Where do you see the Islamic finance industry in, say, the next five years or so?
I see familiarity with Islamic finance growing among conventional finance professionals, moving us towards better assimilation of the concepts and tools of Islamic finance within finance generally. Not long ago securitization or credit derivatives were specialties familiar only to a relative few.
They are now fairly well integrated into the mainstream of finance (people will differ on the merits of this!) and many bankers, lawyers, etc are conversant with them. I also see greater predictability developing in Islamic finance as old deals sour in the current environment and questions and documents are litigated (and hence clarified). Finally, I see a more sophisticated understanding developing of the interaction between Islamic and conventional deals.
Name one thing you would like to see change in the world of Islamic finance.
It would be nice to see a more balanced view of the two strands that create the fabric of Islamic finance: Islamic law and modern finance. Participants often see too much from one perspective and too little from the other. Modern finance, which has developed around basic secular law principles, is being married to a very different system of rules. This is not a simple process, and simplistic views don’t serve the cause.