John Engholm
General Counsel and Company Secretary, Serendipity
John is the General Counsel and CoSec at Serendipity; a Swedish investment group with five publicly traded portfolio companies. When the Market Abuse Regulation came into effect in 2016 and increased their workload, John and his team developed a digital tool for automating this administration.
They started offering the tool to CoSec colleagues at other listed companies and today it is used to save time and ensure compliance by more than 300 companies in eight countries. After less than two years, InsiderLog was spun off and sold for € 7.25 million to Euronext, which operates the stock exchanges in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon and Dublin.
John’s story is an example of how an in-house legal department has not only digitised parts of its internal work flow but has also managed to commercialise and turn this into a profit center for its organisation and shareholders. John often talks to other in-house functions to inspire them to do the same with their own know-how, processes and tools.