Rohith P. George

George is a technology lawyer who guides traditional institutions and digital disrupters through complex transactions, including mergers and acquisitions, licensing and strategic partnerships.

Even before the COVID shutdowns, businesses were reacting to market trends and customer demands by moving to a more digital world. But the pandemic accelerated digital transformation efforts, and George has been busier than ever.

“It shows that not just the new, digital upstarts that we work with and represent, but traditional, incumbent institutions and companies have recognized the need to put digital transformation and modernization efforts to the front burner,” he said.

Over the past couple of years, George helped a U.S.-based bank in its digital transformation efforts. In order to modernize its systems and offer more tech-based services, the bank wanted to upgrade its legacy core banking system to a cloud-hosted, third party software platform.

“Starting from the [request for proposal] stage, we advised them on the RFP, advised them on the bid, helped them select a bidder, negotiated all terms of the agreement, which took the course of six to eight months from beginning to end. It had very high visibility within the bank itself because it was so core to their business,” he said.

On the strength of that initial work, George helped the bank outsource a software development team.

“The bank recognized that now that it had a modern software platform system, what it didn’t have was a modern software development/IT team within the organization to match what they wanted to accomplish over the next five to 10 years,” he said.

From planning to execution, George helped the bank hire a third-party software firm that would dedicate more than 200 developers over three years. At the end of the agreement, the bank would have the right to hire all of the software developers.

George also helped the bank partner with a financial technology company to provide home improvement loans.

“The fintech platform could be used for automated decisioning and for the customer facing aspect of the technology platform, but then the bank would leverage its own core system, balance sheet and loan funding mechanism to provide the loans,” George said. “Home loans aren’t a big focus area for the bank, but this gives them an easy way to reach those customers, and allows them to leverage a fintech’s technology that they don’t have themselves.

“Those types of collaborations we’re doing more and more of,” he said.

— Jennifer Chung Klam