Personal bio
Jay Santiago is an attorney in the Philippines and a qualified solicitor in England & Wales with over 12 years of legal experience in the Philippines and Hong Kong. He is currently Kyndryl's Country General Counsel for the Philippines/ASEAN. Kyndryl is IBM's spin-off company that took over its managed infrastructure services business. As a Country General Counsel, he manages transactions, negotiates contracts, and deals with all legal issues from ASEAN jurisdictions. Before joining Kyndryl in September 2021, Jay's practice focused on (a) corporate restructuring and insolvency proceedings and (b) international dispute resolution, particularly international commercial arbitration and investor-state dispute settlement. He also has substantial experience in mediation, investigations & legal compliance, M&A, corporate housekeeping, intra-corporate disputes, government procurement, cybercrime litigation, and white-collar criminal litigation. Jay is an accredited arbitrator of the Philippine Dispute Resolution Center, the Philippine International Center for Conflict Resolution, and the Office for Alternative Dispute Resolution, which qualifies him to act as an arbitrator in arbitrations involving government agencies in the Philippines. He is a member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators, the Asian Institute of Alternative Dispute Resolution, and the Philippine Institute of Arbitrators. Jay is the co-chair of the CIArb Young Members Group Philippine Chapter, a regional representative of HK45, a Regional Director of the Center for International Alternative Dispute Resolution, and an Ambassador of the IBA Asia-Pacific Arbitration Group. Jay authored chapters in various publications, including the Asia Mediation Handbook (Sweet & Maxwell, 2015), Foreign Investment and Investment Arbitration in Asia (Intersentia, 2019), and Arbitration in Asia (in the Russian language) (Kiaplaw, 2021).