Samai Hurtado

As Legal Counsel & Consultant for XReg Consulting, Samai is responsible for in-house legal matters and providing regulatory consultancy services to clients on regulatory compliance.

Samai is a qualified lawyer with over six years’ experience in financial services regulation. She started her career as a practising barrister and then joined the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC) where she worked for a number of supervisory teams including the funds, banking and investment team and the conduct of business team (CoB). She was responsible for her own portfolio of firms in industries such as insurance, investment services, funds, fund managers, fund administrators, consumer credit, electronic money and payment services.

Following her role in CoB, Samai moved to the Policy team. As a policy advisor Samai’s responsibilities included maintaining and developing an effective legislative and regulatory framework for financial services in Gibraltar and implementing regulatory policy and standards formed by HM Government of Gibraltar, the EU, international initiatives, and market changes. During her time, Samai worked on the delivery of the Legislative Reform Programme (LRP) which was a joint initiative between the GFSC and HM Government of Gibraltar. The LRP aimed to reform and consolidate Gibraltar’s financial services laws and included the transposition of financial services related EU legislation and Brexit related work.

After the delivery of the LRP, Samai joined the Legal Team. As the GFSC’s legal advisor, Samai was responsible for providing legal advice and legal support, particularly in relation to matters concerning authorisation, supervision and regulatory compliance.

Whilst at the GFSC, Samai completed the IOSCO/PIFS-Harvard Law School’s Global Certificate Program for Regulators of Securities Markets and was also the secretariat to the Gibraltar Investor Compensation Scheme (GICS), which operates independently and was established to compensate retail clients for the loss of their eligible investments if an investment firm becomes insolvent.