Lawyer – Consumer Finance and Transport Legal (CFT Legal)

JOB TITLE: Lawyer – Consumer Finance and Transport Legal (CFT Legal)

SALARY: £87,552 - £97,280

LOCATION(S): Chester, Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Halifax, Leeds

HOURS: Full time

WORKING PATTERN: Our work style is hybrid, which involves spending at least two days per week, or 40% of our time, at one of our office sites.

About this opportunity

The Consumer Lending division is now led by Jayne Opperman, offering lending and financing for consumers and vehicle leasing for individuals and businesses in the UK.

• We're the number one provider of credit cards distributed through the four iconic brands of Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and MBNA.

• The same brands offer personal loans to individuals and is one of the top unsecured personal loan providers in the UK.

• Embedded Finance is our newest business. Showcasing innovation through the use of tech to develop new finance solutions for our customers. The first successful product launch was Black Horse FlexPay but the ambitions go wider – EF are exploring many exciting opportunities to grow and expand.

• Through the Transport division (Black Horse, Lex Autolease and Tusker) offering vehicle finance and leasing facilities for both personal and business customers.

• Black Horse provides point-of-sale finance for around 1 million end customers supporting them to purchase their vehicle of choice through 4,700 dealerships.

• Lex Autolease is the UK's largest vehicle leasing and fleet management provider supporting 140,000 business and consumer customers, from sole traders to the largest multinationals. It has a fleet size of over 350,000 vehicles, including cars, vans, mini-buses and emergency vehicles.

• Tusker joined the Transport “family” in February 2023 since that time the size of the fleet has grown 148% and now has 60,000 vehicles as part of its fleet.

Our vision within Consumer Finance and Transport (CFT) Legal is to “Protect, Influence, Empower”. We align with the aims of the business we support in demonstrating the Group’s capabilities to deepen customer relationships and redefine ways of working to deliver a leading customer experience. We're specialists in identifying and guiding on legal risk, but we go further and make real contributions with our commercial insight, whilst ensuring customers receive fair and consistent treatments.

As a CFT Lawyer, your focus will be on issues affecting the Loans and Credit Cards businesses, but there are opportunities to get involved in even broader work within Embedded Finance, Transport, Financial Wellbeing, and Customer Data and Affordability too! You may also be called upon to support other Consumer Legal teams or help to deliver centralised Consumer Legal initiatives.

As well as giving you a broader experience, this flexibility helps us to manage the demands on our colleagues in ever-more agile ways. In this role you’ll report to, and have the support of, a Senior Lawyer within CFT Legal.

We'll be looking for you to focus on growing your own capabilities and investing in personal development by identifying and using the many opportunities within the team.

Day to day you’ll

• Provide insightful, commercial advice, and legal expertise to business and support partners, and facilitate the delivery of excellent outcomes for customers and for LBG across all the products the team supports.

• Be encouraged to provide advice on all aspects of customer journeys, from the on-boarding of customers through to servicing, collections and recoveries processes, contractual documentation, letters, rectifications and new regulations in a way that makes a real difference to a customer’s experience

• Support and provide legal advice on the following:

• consumer duty
• digital journeys
• data privacy
• customer terms & conditions reviews
• new product offerings
• legal developments (statutory or otherwise)
• legal risks (Including ensuring they are appropriately raised, reported, and shared)
• training needs of the businesses we support
• customers in financial difficulty/insolvency
• customer complaints
• rectifications & remediations
• persistent debt

You’ll need to deliver legal technical input to influence projects, with a significant impact across the Group or a number of Business divisions. This means working collectively with lawyers across the Legal Community to provide joined up legal support in the areas of litigation, contentious regulatory, competition, data protection and commercial contracts.

In addition, you’ll:

• Be required to deputise for Senior Lawyers when required.

• Assist in any dealings with the FCA, PRA and other regulatory or trade bodies. This may involve helping to craft external thinking on the reform of consumer credit and consumer protection legislation;

• Work in partnership with other Group, Divisional and Business Divisions - in particular Digital Engagement, Finance, Risk, Conduct, Compliance and Operational Risk (CCOR) and Operations;

• Help to deliver the engagement model between Legal and our internal customers

• Participate in Legal and Secretariat community projects.

About us

We’re on an exciting journey to transform our Group and the way we’re shaping finance for good. We’re focusing on the future, investing in our technologies, workplaces, and colleagues to make our Group a great place for everyone. Including you.

What you’ll need:

• Qualified as a solicitor in the UK (or equivalent qualification) with proven post qualification experience

• Sound legal, commercial and risk judgement and understand and build an effective Legal risk management framework.

• Ability to build effective working partnerships and consensus at all levels across a variety of functions, applying positive relationship management and interpersonal skills not only to ensure compliance with legal requirements but also to proactively challenge, advise and influence management on legal issues.

• Thrive on challenge and be able to balance multiple competing demands through uncertainty or ambiguity.

• Positively influence others by role modelling core LBG values and behaviours.

• Ideally, you'll have technical knowledge of consumer credit law, general consumer law as well as applying FCA Principles, FCA rules (e.g. CONC), Payment Services Regulations, and other requirements applying to the products we support. This will now include an understanding how to implement the higher standard of customer treatment expected under Consumer Duty.

About working for us

Our ambition is to be the leading UK business for diversity, equity and inclusion supporting our customers, colleagues and communities, and we’re committed to creating an environment in which everyone can thrive, learn and develop.

We were one of the first major organisations to set goals on diversity in senior roles, create a menopause health package, and a dedicated Working with Cancer Initiative.

We offer reasonable workplace adjustments for colleagues with disabilities, including flexibility in office attendance, location and working patterns. And, as a Disability Confident Leader, we guarantee interviews for a fair and proportionate number of applicants who meet the minimum criteria for the role with a disability, long-term health or neurodivergent condition through the Disability Confident Scheme.

We provide reasonable adjustments throughout the recruitment process to reduce or remove barriers. Just let us know what you need.

We also offer a wide-ranging benefits package, which includes:

• A generous pension contribution of up to 15%

• An annual performance-related bonus

• Share schemes including free shares

• Benefits you can adapt to your lifestyle, such as discounted shopping

• 30 days’ holiday, with bank holidays on top

• A range of wellbeing initiatives and generous parental leave policies

If you’re excited by the thought of becoming part of our team, get in touch! We’d love to hear from you!