Head of Legal

The story of Fairlo began when our founders, Jimmy and Shamon, saw first-hand how unfair and predatory lending practices can trap

people in cycles of debt. Their mother had been misled by a large bank, and instead of being offered a lifeline, she was pushed

further into financial difficulties. That injustice sparked something: to build a company that reimagines credit, rooted in

transparency, flexibility and respect.

Since launching in 2018, Fairlo has helped tens of thousands of customers access responsible credit when life happens. With

approximately 50,000 active users, a 4.8 Trustpilot rating from 4,200+ reviews and an incredibly low churn rate, we are proving

that transparency and flexibility are not only the right things to do. They are a winning model.

We are a tight team of around 50 people based in Stockholm, Crete and the UK. Backed by some of Sweden’s most experienced

investors and driven by a culture built on kindness, courage, collaboration and common sense, we are very proud of where we are

today.

Our international setup means legal questions span financial regulation, corporate governance, commercial agreements, products,

technology, data protection and everything in between.

We are now entering the most exciting chapter in our journey so far. Fairlo is becoming a bank. This will allow us to drive

innovation, scale responsibly, expand our offering and create fair and transparent financial products that support our customers

throughout different stages of their lives. Becoming a bank also means raising the bar when it comes to governance, legal risk and

regulatory requirements. We need a legal framework that is robust enough for a bank, while remaining pragmatic enough for a

fast-moving and entrepreneurial organisation.

At the same time we are going through a second transformation. Fairlo is becoming an AI-native company, where AI is part of how we

think, work, solve problems and improve. These two shifts are not in conflict. Done properly, they reinforce each other: better

systems make a stronger bank, and a stronger bank needs better systems.

As Head of Legal, you will be Fairlo’s senior legal expert and take ownership of the legal function as we transition into becoming

a bank.

Reporting directly to our CEO, you will work closely with the Board, Executive Crew and teams across Fairlo, providing pragmatic

legal advice and making sure our governance, decision-making and legal framework meet the standards expected of a regulated bank.

You will also hold the role of SUB (Särskilt utsedd befattningshavare) and carry an important responsibility for Fairlo’s work to

prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.

This makes the role broader than a traditional in-house legal position. You will move between strategic advice to the CEO and

Board, corporate governance, financial regulation and AML/CTF, while staying close enough to the business to review an agreement,

support a new product or solve an everyday legal challenge.

Our head of legal will be someone who is interested in leveraging AI to make the business operate more efficiently, and creating

systems which empower the rest of the business to move fast in a compliant, defensible way.

We want Legal involved early. Understanding the business, challenging when needed, and most importantly being solutions focussed

to gain competitive advantages that allow us to excel responsibly.

Most legal functions work like a queue. A question arrives, a lawyer answers it, and everything else waits. That model puts a

ceiling on how fast a company can move, and it puts one person in the middle of every decision.

Something changed in the last two years, and we think it changes this role completely. A lawyer with good judgment can now build

working systems. Not specify them and wait, but actually build them, with their own hands and in days rather than budget cycles.

That single change turns the most experienced legal mind in a company from the person who answers the questions into the person

who builds the thing that answers them.

That is the role we are hiring for. We believe the best legal function is the one that makes most legal work happen without a

lawyer in the middle of it. The way there is to build systems that carry the work: systems that answer the recurring questions, do

the first pass, hold the compliant path open, and escalate only what genuinely needs your judgment. Your time should go to the

decisions that deserve it, and to building the machinery that handles everything else.

This is the same shift our engineering team is making, and it runs through the whole company. We are looking for a Head of Legal

who wants to do exactly that for legal.

To be clear about what this means. The bar stays exactly where it is, and a machine decides nothing that matters. In a regulated

bank accountability stays human, and for a great deal of it, accountability stays with you. What changes is how much unnecessary

work sits between a good decision and getting it done.

→Build, not brief. We expect you to ship working tools. If you can describe what Fairlo needs, you can now build it yourself, and

we will give you the access, the room and the support to do it.

→Put agents on the work instead of documents in a folder. The interesting question is what a system can do end to end. An agent

that reviews every inbound agreement against our positions, drafts the redlines and the reply, and escalates only the clauses

outside mandate. An agent that reads our entire contract estate and tells us what we have actually committed to, what renews when,

and where we have quietly taken contradictory positions.

→Make regulatory change land where it belongs. Build a system that takes a change from Finansinspektionen, the UK FCA, the EBA or

the EU, maps it to the exact policy paragraph, process, product screen and control it touches, and puts the work in front of the

right person with a draft amendment already attached.

→Keep the golden thread intact, continuously. Board decision to policy to instruction to process to evidence. That chain is what a

supervisor actually examines, and it is usually reconstructed by hand under pressure. Build it so it is checked continuously and

can be produced on demand.

→Red-team us before anyone else does. Run adversarial reviews against our own governance framework, contracts and processes.

Simulate a supervisory examination, a dispute, a complaint escalation, and find the weak links while they are still cheap to fix.

This is newly possible, and we think it is one of the places we can get genuinely ahead.

→Turn your judgment into infrastructure. Every call you make should teach the system, so that the fiftieth version of the same

question does not need you at all. Your expertise should compound inside the company rather than be dispensed one answer at a

time.

→Legal in the flow of work. Answers where decisions are actually made, in Slack, in the product, in the pipeline, at the moment

someone needs them, grounded in our own governance framework and our own approved positions rather than the open internet.

→Compliance by construction. Work with Tech so that requirements like pre-contract information, APR presentation and consent are

enforced by the pipeline rather than reviewed after the fact. The compliant path should also be the easiest path.

→Measure the right things. How much legal work gets done well without you. How fast the rest moves. How much of our framework we

could evidence on demand if someone asked tomorrow.

→Act as the primary legal advisor to the CEO, Board and Executive Crew across corporate law, financial services regulation,

commercial agreements, data protection, outsourcing and other relevant legal matters.

→Make sure Fairlo’s corporate governance framework, decision-making structures, Board documentation and corporate formalities meet

applicable legal and regulatory requirements.

→Own the legal perspective of Fairlo’s internal governance framework, including policies, instructions and guidelines, and keep

the thread from Board decision to policy to process intact and evidenced.

As Fairlo’s SUB, you will have a central role in making sure the bank meets its obligations to prevent money laundering and

terrorist financing. You will:

→Oversee Fairlo’s AML/CTF framework, processes and controls, and follow up that agreed measures are implemented across the

organisation.

→Act as Fairlo's Sanctions Responsible (sanktionsansvarig): own the sanctions exposure assessment and screening framework, report

to the Board and FI on sanctions matters, and ensure PEP and sanctions screening operate effectively.

We expect AI to change how a lot of this work gets done, from triaging alerts and preparing cases to keeping the general risk

assessment alive rather than annual. We also expect you to be clear-eyed about where it cannot be used, how decisions stay

explainable and auditable, and how you would defend every choice to Finansinspektionen. The tooling can change. The accountability

does not.

→Where our use cases sit under the EU AI Act, especially anything close to creditworthiness assessment, and what that requires of

us in practice.

You will combine strategic responsibility with hands-on execution, building legal processes and governance that are robust, clear

and scalable, without unnecessary bureaucracy. You will work closely with Compliance and Risk while maintaining a clear division

of responsibilities between Legal as part of the first line and our independent second-line control functions. As Fairlo grows,

you will shape how the Legal function develops, and what capabilities we will need. We would rather you build leverage than

headcount.

→At least 5 years of relevant experience from an in-house legal function or law firm, with a focus on banking, financial services

or another regulated environment.

→Hands-on experience using AI in legal work, and honest judgement about where it helps, where it does not, and where it is not

allowed.

You will mainly work from our Stockholm office, collaborating closely with colleagues across Fairlo. As an international

organisation, you may also travel to our teams and offices in Greece, the UK and other locations as we continue to grow.

We believe in finding people with unique backgrounds and perspectives who want to challenge established ways of doing things. If

you are excited by the opportunity to combine law, governance, AML and business, and to help build a bank where fairness,

transparency and flexibility are built into everything we do, we would love to hear from you.