The 4th Annual Banking & Finance Legal Summit 2017 organised by Lex Witness – India’s 1st Magazine on Legal & Corporate Affairs on 23rd June at JW Marriott Mumbai experienced over 25 industry veterans as Speakers and 80 delegates from the Banks, Financial Institutions and Insurance Industry.

In a tough operating environment for banking and financial service providers with a slowing domestic economy and modest recovery at global and an increased focus on tightening regulatory and governance structures. There have been a number of regulatory initiatives over the past year which seek to enhance the quality of risk-based supervision and better oversight over financial conglomerates.

Through a lot of its initiatives and notifications, the apex bank – The RBI has clearly maintained a stance towards repairing and revival based mechanism as far the NPAs are concerned. There are indications that level of stressed assets which includes both NPAs as well as restructured assets are going up. With the IBC coming into inception & play it is indeed a very encouraging note to commence the new banking era and times for India Inc. Although, while on one hand there is a lot of positivity that the economy sees but on the other hand we have a sea of questions facing the impact and assessment of how the code protects the borrower and lender interests. The insurance penetration in the country is still very low and most of the people buy insurance for tax savings purposes. With understanding of what the ‘service is’, there continue to be and increasing number of disputes, resulting in litigations across consumer forums, ombudsman and other courts.

Changes in regulation and number of agencies involved in regulatory oversight, the necessity to ensure a quick and effective response to identifying potential NPA and action plan for recovery, means – a need to understand and analyse each aspect critically, work with stakeholder, senior management and on organisational level to quickly adapt process and work structure to drive efficiency.

It was against this background that The Lex Witness 4th Annual Banking and Finance Legal Summit 2017is being organised with more focus on practical knowledge sharing. With a combination of power packed panel discussions focused on topical subject, the summit proved out to be a good platform to analyse, interpret and strategize the current and future response to legal, regulatory and compliance challenges.