Baker Donelson's Financial Services Transactions team helps our clients navigate the complex and oftentimes overlapping requirements of federal and state regulatory agencies. We are actively involved in the American Bar Association's Banking Law Subcommittee, are associate members of the Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee Bankers Associations, and serve as counsel to the Tennessee Consumer Finance Association.
Our regulatory and compliance services include:
- Advising organizers of the different regulatory structures available for new businesses and the regulatory steps involved in forming a new business in the financial services industry.
- Assisting clients in forming subsidiaries and other affiliated entities to conduct businesses complementary to banking, including broker-dealers, investment advisers and insurance agencies.
- Advising established businesses on the applicability of various state laws and federal preemption of certain state laws for clients that conduct business across multiple states.
- Interpreting new laws, regulations and regulatory policies, and recommending best practices for systems and controls to maintain compliance.
- Representing the interests of financial institution clients before various local, state and federal administrative and regulatory agencies, including the FDIC, OCC, Federal Reserve System, CFPB, HUD and similar state agencies.
- Negotiating numerous cease-and-desist and consent orders, memorandums of understanding, board resolutions, notices of charges, and other formal and informal agreements and examination results between financial institution clients and state and federal regulatory authorities, including filing appeals with the agencies' Ombudsmans' Offices.
- Assisting various parties involved in FDIC receivership situations, including representing institutions threatened with closure, bidding on acquisitions of failed banks, representing former officers and directors in litigation matters, representing loan participants where there is disagreement when the FDIC is acting as the servicing or a participating bank, purchasing assets from the FDIC and representing borrowers in settling obligations to the FDIC.
- Forming Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) for financial institutions and providing ongoing ERISA compliance and fiduciary duty advice to trustees.
- Addressing questions from clients on a variety of consumer compliance laws, including the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), Code of Conduct and Ethics, Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), cybersecurity, "Terms of Use" for websites, Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), Fair Lending Act, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), privacy, Freedom of Information Act, and other compliance and general operating policy developments.
- Advising clients concerning complex internal investigations for officer, employee and customer fraud; insurance and bonding claims; and compliance with regulatory requirements such as completing Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs).
- Providing legislative advice to financial institutions and the Tennessee Bankers Association, including monitoring and interacting with the legislative branches of federal, state and local government.
Related Services
For more information about Baker Donelson's experience relating to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau compliance and enforcement actions, please refer to our CFPB page. In addition to assisting clients in the financial services industry with compliance and regulatory matters, our team provides Corporate Services, Capital Raising Services and Merger and Acquisition Services.