Natalie Lewis is a Financial Services and Markets partner, and is the Head of the firm’s multi-disciplinary Fintech, Market Infrastructure and Payments (FMIP) Group.
She is well-known for being one of the most passionate, well-connected and proactive leaders in that field.
Her clients seek her out for advice on many matters, covering all aspects of payment services regulation, digital assets and DLT, settlement finality, and fintech product and organisational design, and she is especially well-known for her unrivalled experience and expertise advising on the unique, complex, and interlocking regimes governing the establishment and operation of financial market infrastructures. Under her leadership, the FMIP team has achieved the “holy trinity” of advising all three types of FMI - payment systems operators, central securities depositaries, and central counterparties. She also has an increasingly busy practice advising banks and the FMIP team houses the firm’s centre of excellence on the regulation of consumer finance.
Besides her client work, Natalie occupies a series of high-profile and demanding leadership roles in the ecosystem. She is a full member of the invitation-only legal expert fora, the Financial Markets Law Committee and the City of London Law Society Financial Law Committee. Within the industry itself, she was elected to sit as a member of The Payments Association’s Advisory Board (having led, and continuing to mentor, its Digital Currencies Working Group and supported several others) and she is a major participant on legal and regulatory matters in Innovate Finance’s Digital Pound Foundation, and sits on UK Finance’s Strategic Payments Panel. She also founded and co-ordinates a flourishing Women in Fintech network, designed and oversees Travers Smith’s accelerator programme, Fintech Amplifier, and is the driving force behind the firm’s acclaimed annual Future of Fintech conference, which she conceived of and chairs. She has won a long list of awards, and has been listed for several years as part of Innovate Finance’s Women in Fintech Powerlist.
Natalie’s relentless focus on understanding and delivering her clients’ objectives make her equally comfortable dealing with a single founder beginning his or her journey, as she is advising the board of a global, systemically important FMI, and everyone in between.