The Client Profile: Sonya Rogerson, Bank of China

Born in Hong Kong to an English father and a Chinese mother but raised in Australia, Sonya Rogerson’s passion for different cultures and foreign travel is no surprise. ‘Do I miss home?’ she asks herself. ‘Well, home is where I make it.’

Now based in London, she is two years into her role as UK general counsel (GC) and head of legal and compliance of the fourth-largest bank in the world, Beijing-headquartered and state-owned Bank of China (BoC). She says she was headhunted to run a legal and compliance team of 47 staff not only because of her lengthy résumé of handling transactional legal work in the Asia-Pacific region but also her experience of working with the Chinese.

‘Most of my career in private practice and in-house has been very international, with a focus on emerging and developing markets. The common theme across all the industries I’ve worked in – from industrial gas, manufacturing, banking and professional services – is that the companies are interested in business expansion and they’re acquisitive. The second would be their international footprint and their focus on Asia-Pacific and emerging markets.’

‘You’ve heard of the Australian love of travel. Travelling is one thing but actually doing business in different countries is something that really interested me.’

After deciding she wanted to become a lawyer, Rogerson qualified into the corporate team of one of Australia’s six major law firms at the time – Blake Dawson Waldron (now Ashurst) – in 2000. However, she got the in-house bug after taking a job as a legal manager at investment firm NM Rothschild & Sons in Sydney for three years and then moved to industrial gas giant The Linde Group as associate counsel.

Eighteen months later and Rogerson made a strategic move to the UK in an effort to undertake more international legal work. ‘I did a stint in the military in Australia before Blake Dawson Waldron but I decided that I wanted to pursue an international career, so I knew that I had to leave Australia. You’ve heard of the Australian love of travel. Travelling is one thing but actually doing business in different countries is something that really interested me.’

Landing in London just in time for the financial crash to wreak havoc with the markets, she joined Norton Rose as an associate in 2007 before moving to British American Tobacco, staying for eight years and becoming M&A projects and compliance counsel for Asia-Pacific. A two-year run as GC APAC at UK national standards body the BSI Group soon followed.

‘My heart was always in-house, so as soon as I found the right opportunity in London, I moved out of private practice again. In Australia I did a lot of Asia-Pacific-focused transactions but coming to England I’ve done Russian deals, deals in Ukraine, South America, Africa, Peru, Sudan and more interesting types of work in Bangladesh, Vietnam and China. You get more of other parts of the world being based in London.’

She describes working at the BoC, a 108-year-old institution that set up its London branch in 1929, as fascinating. ‘It’s admirable that the Chinese had the foresight to set up a base in London so long ago. The breadth and depth of the bank’s business is very broad with a retail business, a corporate lending business and a wholesale business. It’s one of the most international of the Chinese banks and it doesn’t just service its Chinese clients here in London, but also serves local people, and enables a better bridge between the UK and China.’

Day to day, Rogerson’s team will be met with a variety of challenges, including contingency planning for the rapidly-spreading coronavirus pandemic; Brexit planning; strategic projects; and ongoing regulatory engagement. ‘Regulation in China is very broad and all I can say is that the regulator is very active and its expectations are considered very seriously. We take our obligations of openness and transparency with the regulator very seriously in China, same as in the UK.’

Her job also comes with some hefty responsibilities in the form of complex geopolitical risks to navigate. ‘Going to lots of different places and doing business is interesting. You’re doing deals where you are relying on government assurances and it’s a case of having to decide if we’re going to rely on regime-change possibilities – it’s a matter of balancing promises with regime change and getting comfortable with geopolitical changes that can come very quickly and have severe consequences for the business. At British American Tobacco, we were the first British company to re-enter Myanmar after international sanctions lifted in 2013 and I’ve been in a number of situations where we’ve had to consider very carefully whether we were a first mover to enter a market or whether we were the last to exit, based on changes to laws and regulations.’

She says she has been in a number of situations where the BoC has taken the decision to exit businesses based on changes to governments and regulations. ‘What I find fascinating about being in-house is the insight as to how decisions are made and why. I get involvement in the boardroom – I attend some of those meetings but not all of them. Sitting across the table enables you to learn how other cultures operate. Even though I’m half Chinese, sitting by their side in the Bank of China really gives an added perspective to working for the Chinese and one of its leading financial institutions.’

Legal Business’ interview with Rogerson takes place half an hour later than originally scheduled, in case her lecture to law students at the Université de Poitiers in France overran – she has been teaching part-time on English contract law at the university for over a decade. ‘I enjoy teaching and it reminds me what a real lawyer does: talking and thinking about cases. But I try to make my lecturing as practical as possible with real life cases from my international work.’

‘I’m interested in how I can learn techniques from Premier League managers for managing my department. Jürgen Klopp has spent four years building a team and he’s done an outstanding job.’

Her team presumably benefits from her decade-long experience of teaching on the side – although this forces Rogerson to admit that she does not have much work-life balance at the moment. However, it is not her lecturing that necessarily provides the inspiration for guiding her legal and compliance team at the BoC – rather more so the managerial skills of a certain Jürgen Klopp.

‘I’m interested in how I can learn techniques from Premier League managers for managing my department. I find the whole drama and pressure of football management fascinating and I’m very interested in how sports psychology is relevant to corporate psychology in getting the best out of people and keeping a Millennial workforce motivated. There’s a lot to learn from the expectations and pressure professional sports players are under. Liverpool’s manager, Jürgen Klopp, has spent four years building a team and he’s done an outstanding job. I’ve been looking at his style because I’m also building a new team and doing lots of change transformation. It’s a journey and it takes time.’

anna.cole-bailey@legalease.co.uk