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Financial Services

We advise clients on a broad range of public policy matters impacting the financial services sphere, and we have particularly strong expertise in the property/casualty and life insurance sectors. We have been closely involved with the formulation, implementation and reform of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act and the CARES Act, and offer clients strategic advice and counsel based on our long experience and ties with key policymakers. Our practice also has particular experience with financial services policy matters as they apply on both sides of the Atlantic, and our team has been instrumental in key cross-border negotiations and policy implementation.

Experience Highlights

  • Represented a broad-based business coalition of 85 major trade and professional associations, following September 11 in fashioning and securing enactment of a federal terrorism insurance backstop to the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act of 2002 (TRIA) and in subsequent TRIA reauthorization campaigns; most recently the successful 2019 reauthorization.

  • Represented a major real estate trade association in preparing strategic plan for TRIA reauthorization in 2019-2020.

  • Represents a major multinational insurer before Congress and the Executive Branch on a wide range of legislative and regulatory issues that would affect their trading position in the United States. Among current work, implementation of rules relating to private flood insurance; the 2019 reauthorization of the TRIA; potential revisions to federal Surety Bond Program regulations; and pandemic response proposals.

  • Represented a major multinational insurer in connection with Dodd-Frank Act Title V and subsequent successful efforts to secure a US-EU "covered agreement" on insurance/reinsurance prudential matters.

  • Represents a major insurance trade association in developing strategy relating to the regulatory implementation of private flood insurance acceptance requirements in a manner that achieves the client’s goals, and drafted proposed regulations and executive order designed to implement this strategy. Our team’s efforts further refined the product to secure a broad industry consensus on the proposal culminating in multiagency advocacy that ultimately produced a promulgated final rule that achieved much of the client’s goals.

  • Represents a major insurance trade association in connection with preparation of pandemic response proposals in both chambers of Congress.

  • Represented a mid-sized bank subject to FDIC macroprudential supervision in connection with the proposed increase of the SIFI asset threshold from $50 billion to $250 billion in the Senate Dodd-Frank 2018 reform bill, S. 2155.

  • Represented a mid-sized bank in securing a favorable tax treatment (pass-through rate) for a particular banking ownership structure.

  • Represented one of the world's largest managers of money market mutual funds (MMFs), in advocacy before the NAIC and state regulators to obtain "cash equivalency" treatment of MMFs in insurer financial statements.

  • Represents a major European insurance trade association with respect to proposals in recent Congresses that would, among other things, create a new cause of action for Holocaust survivors or kin to sue in federal courts the US affiliates of European insurers that were doing business during 1933-45.

Key Contacts

Janice Bashford
Janice Bashford
Partner
Washington, D.C.
+1 202.942.6185
Mark Epley
Mark Epley
Partner
Washington, D.C.
+1 202.942.5964
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