Setu
Website:
setu.co
Job details:
About Setu
Setu empowers businesses to reimagine financial products for the next billion users. We build low-cost, modular API infrastructure so that businesses can go live with a fintech product or service in a matter of days, not months.
We firmly believe that the only way to make financial products accessible to millions is to remove the red tape involved and switch to a completely digital infrastructure that can handle these small-ticket, high-volume transactions.
We break these financial products into their fundamental building blocks and offer them as APIs to developers, startups, and enterprises. They can then package these APIs into highly custom apps, tailor-made for their customers.
We believe that financial technology will be a core part of every company’s offering. And at Setu, we’re building the fintech infrastructure that will accelerate this.
Importance of the Role
At Setu, we believe that every company can become a fintech company.
Given that financial services is a highly regulated sector, our mission of being a bridge between regulated financial institutions and fast-growing technology companies comes with a significant set of responsibilities. One of our core value propositions to our developers, in addition to ease of technical integration and eliminating commercial negotiations, is reducing their regulatory and legal compliance burden. As part of the legal team at Setu, your primary responsibility will be to fulfill this promise to our developers.
This means crafting our relationships with asset partners in a way that reduces paperwork for developers, allocates risk fairly between the parties, and involves Setu doing as much as possible of the heavy lifting for its developers. All of this needs to be achieved while also making our developer platform self-serve and extremely user friendly, which will require using the latest legal-tech tools.
The financial regulatory framework is complex and transforming quickly. Your role will also involve handling regulatory reporting and compliance where Setu and its associate entities have taken on the appropriate regulated or licensed role in the system. This will require keeping track of not just existing regulations, but those that are around the corner, to ensure that Setu remains at the cutting edge of the fintech landscape.
As a company, our endeavour is to maximise efficiency as much as possible. Fulfilling legal and regulatory requirements can often be one of the tasks that takes longest to complete in any potential partnership. Your role will involve using the latest legal technology tools, and smart contracting strategies, to ensure that the lead time for these tasks is pared down to the absolute minimum.
What will you do at Setu?
You will report to the Head - Legal & Compliance, being the first point of contact for day-to-day legal and compliance matters. While you will report to the legal leadership of Setu, the expectation is that you will function with a high level of independence and responsibility, ownership for the tasks you are handling, and learn to make quick decisions under the guidance of the team. This will also involve ensuring that you prudently escalate matters of importance to legal leadership. The legal & compliance team has a range of responsibilities, including:
- Crafting and modifying our contract templates, to make them as simple as possible while also protecting everyone’s interests.
- Supporting the business and operations teams in negotiating and closing out contracts within tight timelines, and ensuring that the execution of contracts is effectively tracked to support the assessment of the company’s performance metrics.
- Regulatory review of new products and features to ensure that they are compliant with law and policy, and supporting the product and business teams on questions of regulatory compliance that arise in the normal course of business. You will also have to support our business team in understanding permissible use cases for each product in line with regulatory guidelines, and ensuring that customers are appropriately vetted before onboarding.
- Understanding the regulatory frameworks created by the RBI and other financial sector regulators, NPCI circulars, and operating guidelines. In particular, a deep understanding of existing payments frameworks will be key, in addition to emerging platforms.
- Understanding the regulatory framework around Account Aggregators to handle regulatory reporting and compliance for Setu’s associate entity, which is a licensed Account Aggregator. This will also require familiarising yourself with laws affecting a regulated entity, including but not limited to anti-money laundering laws, and KYC guidelines, and ensuring that you keep track of returns and declarations to be filed with the regulator.
- Advising product, engineering, design, and other internal teams on new product and feature development to ensure Setu’s products protect end-user interests, address policy considerations, and are compliant with applicable regulations by design.
- Ensuring that we comply with both the letter and spirit of data protection laws and setting up a contractual framework that ensures that our partners do the same. To this end, a working knowledge of India’s data protection framework and keeping track of new developments with respect to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, will be essential.
- Coordinating with internal and external teams to ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, helping manage this process end-to-end, and maintaining compliance with license terms and reporting requirements.
- Coordinating with the Finance team and support for ongoing audits from a secretarial perspective.
- Serve as a point of contact for external regulatory audits, inquiries, and compliance matters.
Who is the right fit for this role?
To excel in this role you will need the following skills:
- Ability to take ownership: You have to be confident about scoping out your work, holding yourself accountable, and be comfortable taking judgment calls to keep day-to-day legal matters moving, while also knowing when to escalate.
- Attention to detail: Our contracts need to be carefully drafted so that they are easy to comprehend and fair to all parties so that we cut down on negotiation time without compromising our interests.
- Good negotiator: You will need to negotiate our relationships with large numbers of external partners, which means having a keen sense of fairness and great communication skills.
- Drive to stay informed: Navigating the world of fintech regulation means keeping track of changes in the law almost every day. This means you will need to have the drive to stay continually informed, keep track of new changes and help our teams understand how this affects our products and processes.
- Going beyond the law: Our legal and compliance function interacts closely with every team in the company, and we pride ourselves on our technical and fintech knowledge. This will mean developing an understanding of our products, business, technical processes, and information security. You will need to have the motivation to go beyond your comfort zone and learn about subjects beyond the law.
- Experience and qualifications: These are entry-level requirements that are essential for you to be able to fulfill these responsibilities:
- A law degree from an Indian university, or a passing grade in the Indian qualifying examination if you hold a foreign law degree.
- Qualified company secretary.
- 5 to 8 years of work experience, preferably at a fintech, regulated financial institution, or a law firm where your work involved financial regulation.
Why Setu?
We will spare no efforts to ensure that Setu empowers you to do the most important and impactful work of your career—
- Opportunity to work closely with the founding team who built and scaled public infrastructure such as UPI, GST, Aadhaar, etc.
- We care deeply about your growth. So we work hard to provide you with—
- A fully stocked library and unlimited book budget.
- Tickets to conferences and industry events.
- Learning sessions where we invite both team members and external experts to teach you something new.
- Learning and development allowance that gives access to subscriptions, courses, certifications, music classes, and much more. Grow, learn, and improve with Setu!
- Kick-ass benefits including comprehensive health insurance for you and your family, personal accident and term life insurance, access to mental health counsellors, extraordinary coffee, and a beautiful office with lots of solid wood and natural light.
- We work hard to make sure our team is diverse and varied. We interview and hire purely on merit, skill, and competence—everything else is irrelevant.
Our core DNA
Our culture code—How We Move, defines the behaviours we expect from our people. When you display any of the six culture code elements, you demonstrate ‘Every Day is Game Day’. The six elements of our culture code—
- Take the shot: You decide fast and deliver right.
- Sign your work like an artist: You master what you do and take pride in it.
- Be the sherpa: You lead your crew on every expedition.
- Be the CEO of what you do: You own it and make things happen.
- Care with tough love: You empower others with trust, respect, and openness.
- Own tomorrow: You innovate for the customer and beyond.
Click on Apply to know more.