Kylie Slambert is an Executive Director and Legal & Compliance Counsel at M-KOPA South Africa, where she covers a plethora of legal and compliance matters ranging from regulatory compliance to commercial contracts to employment law. She cut her teeth over six years at Hogan Lovells and Baker McKenzie before bringing that experience in-house and now builds compliance infrastructure inside a fast-scaling fintech navigating the financial credit sector in real time. She believes the best legal advice is the kind nobody notices, because it just works.
Session Overview
Two Hats, One Desk: Running Legal and Compliance as a Single Function in a Fast-Moving Fintech
For most legal teams, legal and compliance sit in separate boxes, with different reporting lines, different mandates, sometimes different buildings. In fast-growing fintechs, that separation is a luxury few can afford, and the cost of pretending otherwise shows up fast, in contracts that look fine on paper but create regulatory exposure the moment they’re operationalised.
This session draws on real, current experience running legal and compliance as a single function inside a fintech operating under the National Credit Act, during a period when South Africa’s credit regulator has been actively sharpening how it reasons about newer, non-traditional credit models. It covers what that convergence looks like in practice, spotting where a commercial or operational agreement quietly creates a compliance obligation nobody flagged, and managing regulatory registration processes while the underlying product is still evolving.
Attendees will leave with three practical takeaways.
1. Where the legal vs. compliance split creates blind spots. Treating them as separate functions lets regulatory risk slip through at the drafting stage, so it’s worth knowing what to watch for in your own contract process.
2. How a single contractual mechanism can trigger regulatory classification, independent of your core product. This is illustrated by the NCR’s recent finding on buy-now-pay-later default fees, where a specific fee structure (not the product itself) created a regulated incidental credit agreement. The lesson generalises well beyond BNPL, exposure often hides in a clause, not a label.
3. How to build compliance infrastructure with limited resources. A practical approach to prioritising registers, risk frameworks, and reporting when you can’t build everything at once.
Alternatively, please email sales@eventfulpeople.com for quote, invoice or any queries and we’ll be glad to assist.
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Kylie Slambert is an Executive Director and Legal & Compliance Counsel at M-KOPA South Africa, where she covers a plethora of legal and compliance matters ranging from regulatory compliance to commercial contracts to employment law. She cut her teeth over six years at Hogan Lovells and Baker McKenzie before bringing that experience in-house and now builds compliance infrastructure inside a fast-scaling fintech navigating the financial credit sector in real time. She believes the best legal advice is the kind nobody notices, because it just works.
