Expert legal knowledge is critical for the affairs of a company, and thus often requires a keen understanding of the functioning of each department, business interests, and organizational priorities to identify the structure in which sustainable compliance needs to be established. Where there remains a relative dearth of options in the highly competitive and niche technology law space, Megha Nambiar stands pronounced leveraging her extensive expertise to guide organizations across challenges in data protection, regulatory, risk, and compliance. With her dexterity in the legal space, she has made note worthy contributions to diverse organizations.

Recently, Megha engaged in an exclusive interaction with CEO Insights. Let's hear it from her.

Can you share your journey and experience in the legal field, including how you got started and what has kept you motivated throughout your career?
Law as a course of study was largely happenstance, practicing law as a career has definitely been a deliberate choice. In Law school, I interned across various organizations, practice areas, and domains, of which TMT law stood out and specifically interested me as a potential career path. I started my career at law firms and went on secondment as the sole legal counsel to a large fintech company. This was my first professional experience working inhouse at a company building cutting edge technology and provided me the opportunity to examine and advise on nuanced legal problem statements at the confluence of law & technology. Having thoroughly enjoyed helming legal inhouse, setting SOPs ground up and being deeply involved in the shaping and implementation of legal protocols and compliance frameworks, I joined Hyperverge a leading AI company in March 2020 as its first inhouse counsel. Working with some of the brightest minds in technology, with products across multiple geographies (and an array of legislations) in an extremely enabling environment has been a stellar opportunity.

I have had a steep learning curve advising product companies in the domains of credit analysis, geospatial technology, legal tech, gaming, and identity verification over the last few years. Being the first inhouse legal counsel at two organizations has taught me the importance of creating compliance rigor across levels and teams that carry out the practical implementation, setting up resilient processes, and understanding crossfunctional concepts to provide wholesome legal advice. The opportunity to do what I’m genuinely interested in, constantly learning from an incredible set of colleagues at Hyperverge, and the exceptional work of some of my peers in the industry keep me motivated to do better every day.

How have you seen Legal grow from a support function to a valued contributor to business?
Legal risk and compliance consciousness are at the heart of a business with strong fundamentals. The need for creating cross jurisdiction risk assessment/ mitigation frameworks, ensuring legal business acumen across the organization in decision making, and the province of the product becoming a cross functional exercise has led to the evolution of the role of inhouse counsels.

Legal considerations play an important role in determining the geographies one should expand to, determined often by the compliance costsstrategies and regulatory environments in the relevant jurisdictions. In sectors like fintech regulatory changes can require product or process overhauls and can also usher in new opportunities for the business as we have seen with the introduction of video KYC a few years ago and more recently with KYC becoming mandatory in spheres like general insurance, potentially the gaming sector, and more.

An inhouse legal team acts as the center for all legal planning, advisory, and alignment for all departments within an organization. This is in addition to driving corporate governance, M&A, litigation management, development of IP strategy planning, and more. all of which find a critical place in an organization's growth story.

Hyperverge's Product Vision Is To Democratize Digital Transactions

Tell us about Hyperverge, highlighting its vision & mission.
Hyperverge was founded by a team of five students from IIT Madras, back in 2013. The team specialized in solving fundamental real world problems using Computer Vision AI. Betting on the life changing impact of new age technologies the co-founders set out on their entrepreneurial journey to build for and create a positive impact in society.

Hyperverges vision is to democratize digital transactions. Today, billions of people globally don’t have access to basic financial necessities such as savings, investments, lending, and insurance. We build technology products to catalyze change and accelerate inclusion. As an organization, our focus is excellence, compliance, and contribution. While we focus on innovation, growth, and ensuring that we provide the best AI has to offer, we care deeply about building an organization and creating a meaningful impact that outlasts us. With this thought process, we are working on building Hyperverge Academy, which aims to provide young people from under resourced communities with access to skills and networking opportunities to break the cycle of poverty and achieve their potential.

Tell us about your flagship offerings and what value additions you offer to customers.
Hyperverge provides AI-based KYC, KYB & AML solutions to businesses in banking, financial services, fintech, insurance, gaming, logistics, and e-Commerce sectors. Large enterprises like Jio, Vodafone, SBI, LIC, and Grab trust us with business critical processes.

Our USP lies in building inhouse tech which significantly places us ahead of competitors on all AI accuracy parameters leading to much higher value add to our customers. We work very closely with our enterprise clients to understand their businesses and build custom solutions to solve their critical problems. Aside from product superiority, it is our people that we find to be our key strength. We are extremely proud of our NPS scores and frequent client appreciation for the quality of people interactions across functions.

Megha K. Nambiar, Legal Head, Hyperverge
Megha's learner mindset, an innate interest in business & tech fundamentals, strong negotiation & research skills has enabled her to proficiently lead Hyperverge from the front.