Banking & Financial Services

Highly attuned to the rapid growth and ever-changing issues of the financial community, our banking and financial services group provides sophisticated legal counsel and day-to-day representation to a wide range of financial institutions and corporate clients.  Armed with technical expertise and extensive knowledge of the regulations and regulators that impact our clients’ businesses, we represent merchant banks, commercial banks, corporate treasuries, retail and credit card banks, bank holding companies, foreign banks, securities firms and mortgage institutions.  With our practical business approach to addressing clients’ problems, our experienced team of attorneys and our commitment to providing high quality service, Hughes Hubbard is positioned to successfully represent foreign and domestic financial institutions and companies in all of their transactional and regulatory needs.

Credit Enhancement and Trade Finance

The Firm has extensive experience in the representation of banks as dealers in commercial paper, and as providers of credit enhancement to issuers accessing the United States capital markets.  The Firm has a particular expertise in the representation of issuers from the Latin American region, and regularly represents corporate clients accessing the capital markets using commercial paper.  In the area of trade finance, we provide assistance in structuring, negotiating and documenting trade-related facilities, including letters of credit, syndicated loans, and note purchase agreements.  We work closely with Ex-Im Bank, export credit agencies, private insurers and reinsurers.  Our attorneys advise clients in the purchase and sale of trade-related assets and in the development of structured derivative products to impart tax and currency arbitrage to providers of trade finance credit.

Capital Markets and Derivative Products

With expertise in the representation of commercial banks, investment banks and their affiliates from Asia and Latin America, our banking and financial services practice has extensive experience in representing both dealers and end-users of derivative and structured products in the global marketplace in various matters, including fixed-income, credit derivatives and equity derivatives, as well as credit-linked notes, CDOs and asset-backed securities, and in the development of new products.  Our attorneys have a long track record of working closely with quasi-governmental agencies involved in the resolution of failed financial institutions and in the disposition of assets, including non-performing loans, through bulk loan sales and securitizations.

Credit Transactions, Project Finance and Corporate Finance

We regularly handle a large number of syndicated credit facilities, asset-based loans, and non-recourse project loans secured by real estate, project cash flow and other collateral for leading financial institutions in energy projects.  Our attorneys assist in joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, securities offerings, emerging companies, technology transactions and all corporate legal issues with a financing component.

Consumer Credit, Credit Cards and Electronic Commerce

Featuring attorneys who specialize in the area of electronic commerce and cyber-banking, our banking and financial services practice is uniquely qualified to assist clients in the development and execution of retail banking, credit card programs and Internet-based financial services for consumers.  We advise on all aspects of state and federal consumer credit laws and regulations, including privacy, electronic signatures and interest rate regulation.  We also assist clients to purchase or sell credit card and mortgage portfolios and businesses.  We help to establish co-branded credit card programs and open-end and closed-end credit products which are marketed via the Internet or through traditional marketing channels.  Our clients include domestic and foreign banks and thrifts, and a wide range of other financial services providers, such as finance companies, leasing companies, credit card issuers, credit card acquirors, industrial loan companies and money transmitters.

Banking Regulation

We regularly provide advice to our clients on a wide range of federal and state banking laws, including the Bank Holding Company Act, the National Bank Act, the Federal Deposit Insurance Act and the International Banking Act, and their implementing regulations.  Our clients include federally chartered and state chartered banks, and major international banks from Latin America, Japan and the United Kingdom.  Our financial services lawyers are up-to-date in the most timely areas of banking regulation, including the USA Patriot Act and Bank Secrecy Act compliance, and expansion of banking and non-banking activities and acquisitions by bank holding company subsidiaries.  We have working relationships with the legal and supervisory staffs in Washington and New York at the federal and state banking agencies to help in the coordination of bank applications.

Litigation, Dispute Resolution and Restructuring

Members of the Banking & Financial Services Group specialize in financial institution-related litigation and alternative dispute resolution and in the negotiation of workouts and restructuring of private, commercial and sovereign debts.  We have advised federal government agencies in connection with the sale of assets of failed banks and the financing of such sales.  We have also advised foreign central banks and the foreign countries’ ministries of finance and other foreign government agencies in the establishment of failed banks regulatory schemes and in the enforcement of debts and collection of assets.

Our litigators have handled a wide range of disputes involving financial institutions from major lender liability litigation to fast-moving injunctive actions over letters of credit or moveable collateral, to breach of fiduciary duty claims against indenture trustees, to complex international derivative transaction disputes, to complex international frauds, to restructuring of debt in the bankruptcy context, to attachment and garnishment proceedings, under the Foreign Sovereign Immunity Act of 1976 and legal process seeking to reach offshore documents or assets.  We have often represented public and private, domestic and foreign financial institutions and the disputes often involve multinational elements.

In the international area, we are experienced in prosecuting and defending litigation on behalf of foreign bank regulators, whether arising from the activities of those regulators or from the failure of foreign financial institutions.  These matters often involve application of the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act or principals of international comity, as well as efforts to recover sums transferred from foreign jurisdictions to accounts in the U.S.