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Finance, Funds & Restructuring

Finance Regulatory

Global practice at the forefront of financial regulation, working with banks, markets, and next-generation platforms to redefine financial markets and help clients achieve their goals.

Financial regulation is no longer confined to traditional financial institutions, and we built a full-service global regulatory team that is just as comfortable supporting longstanding global financial institutions, including banks, investment advisers, and insurance companies, as it is addressing first-impression legal questions presented by next-generation fintech platforms delivered through mobile and web applications, digital asset networks, and blockchain technology.

We know that our clients operate within overlapping and complicated regulatory regimes, where supervision is continuous, expectations evolve rapidly, and enforcement risk is increasingly active and cross-border in nature.

Our financial regulatory team brings together deep institutional regulatory strength in every major financial market and market-leading fintech, funds, and digital asset industry expertise. We advise global and domestic banks, asset managers, and technology-driven financial platforms navigating this complex and fluid regulatory environment, helping them understand where regulation applies, how it shapes business models, and how to operate confidently within it.

When our clients need advocates, whether regulatory enforcement defense or formal litigation, our team has earned a reputation for helping them negotiate efficient and practical outcomes and, where required, defend their positions through enforcement proceedings and litigation.

Our lawyers design and implement regulatory compliance programs and provide practical answers to the difficult questions across banking, funds, payments, broker-dealer activity, and digital assets across major markets in Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and the United States. We are also deeply entrenched in international, national, and local policy—advising regulators on statutory and regulatory change and helping each industry within the financial services sector respond when governments ask for input on regulatory changes.

We help our clients obtain necessary licensing, chartering, and registrations, assist them in examinations, and evaluate the regulatory nuances of mergers and asset sales in order to operate legally in highly regulated environments.

We are not just regulatory professionals, we are product counsel. Our regulatory lawyers team with other lawyers across the firm through our innovative industry approach to client service to help clients design and build compliant products and services for the next generation of financial services.

Global regulatory alignment

We coordinate legal advice across key financial regulatory regimes in the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. Our work spans prudential supervision, conduct obligations, and financial crime frameworks, with a focus on how regulators across multiple jurisdictions interpret, apply, and enforce their rules in practice.

Institutions, platforms, and investment markets

We advise global financial institutions, trading venues, and clearing houses on prudential regulation, capital, liquidity, governance, and resolution planning. Our team provides pioneering legal counsel in the fintech and digital asset spaces and is recognized for market-leading work in tokenization, blockchain, payments, and digital assets.

Supervision and enforcement

Our team includes decades-long veterans from major banks, exchanges, and commodities agencies around the world who bring firsthand perspective to licensing decisions, supervisory examinations, and enforcement actions. We help clients anticipate regulatory concerns, respond strategically, and reduce avoidable risk.

Full financial services scope

We advise across the full spectrum of the financial services universe, including banking, capital markets, insurance, payments, fintech, and digital assets. This includes regulatory issues involving custody, clearing, settlement, distribution, and platform-based financial services that do not fit neatly within traditional regulatory categories.

Financial crime and regulatory response

We advise on AML/CTF, sanctions, fraud, market misconduct, and regulatory investigations. We represent clients in supervisory examinations and enforcement proceedings involving banking, securities, and financial crime regulators, and support remediation and regulatory engagement following findings or breaches.

Leading-edge projects

Our team was first to advise on some of today’s most significant financial services innovations, including Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs), digital asset licensing, special-purpose trust and OCC charters for crypto custodians, DAO wrappers, service of process by NFT, T-0 stock issuance, tokenization of real-world assets and securities, and stablecoin issuance.

How we can help

Regulatory entry and product design

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Regulatory entry and product design

We analyze applicability of financial regulations to new business models, technologies, products, and platforms before launch. This includes regulatory perimeter analysis, product counseling, licensing strategy, and structuring services across banking, payments, investments and asset management services, and digital asset frameworks.

We advise retail financial services providers across traditional and digital models, including banks, retail stockbrokers, wealth managers, digital investment platforms, robo-advisers, challenger banks, fintech providers and payment businesses. Our experience covers products ranging from securities, funds, and complex investments to loans, mortgages, buy now, pay later, point-of-sale finance, and other innovative consumer offerings.

We help clients understand how regulators are likely to classify and assess new products and financial technologies, particularly where regulatory boundaries are still developing. We also act as product counsel, helping established institutions, market entrants, and emerging companies to refine their offerings, align design with regulatory expectations, and bring viable products and services to market. 
Licensing, registration, and market expansion

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Licensing, registration, and market expansion

We manage regulatory applications, registrations, and authorizations—from the design stage through to approvals—across banking, investment advisory, asset management, payments (e-money), money transmission, and digital asset exchange and custody regimes.

We coordinate multijurisdictional filings and regulatory engagement to support expansion into new markets, and to establish organizational-wide compliance and structural support for regulatory requirements that may vary by jurisdiction.
Compliance architecture

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Compliance architecture

Together with our Advisory colleagues, we design, review, and strengthen compliance frameworks for regulated financial institutions and technology-driven platforms. This includes governance structures, risk frameworks, internal controls, monitoring systems, remediation programs, SMCR, conduct rules, ESG requirements and major regulatory change projects, including consumer duty, IFPR, MiFID II, AIFMD, and MAR.

We help clients build effective AML, sanctions, anti-fraud, and transaction-monitoring programs, with a focus on systems that can withstand regulatory scrutiny and supervisory testing and scale with growth.
Supervision, exams, and enforcement response

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Supervision, exams, and enforcement response

We support clients through regulatory examinations, supervisory engagement, investigations, and enforcement actions. This includes responding to regulator inquiries, managing findings, coordinating remediation, and advising on escalation risk and resolution strategy.

We advise across prudential regulators, securities regulators, banking supervisors, and financial crime authorities. 
Guiding digital asset and blockchain innovation

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Guiding digital asset and blockchain innovation

Our dedicated team of multidisciplinary digital assets professionals helped found the modern blockchain and cryptocurrency industry. We help banks, exchanges, wallet providers, OTC desks, asset custodians, Layer-1 protocols, Layer-2 services, DeFi networks and services, DAOs, stablecoin issuers, and issuers of tokenized real world assets design, launch, and maintain new market infrastructure and services while managing the novel regulatory risks these technologies present.