Banking

At the forefront of the evolving financial landscape, Steptoe's Financial Innovation and Regulation Banking team offers comprehensive guidance for clients implementing both established and digital banking solutions.

Our team is comprised of experienced attorneys from diverse backgrounds, including former banking, consumer finance, and financial services regulators, as well as senior in-house counsel. Our collective experience gives us an in-depth understanding of the novel issues surrounding the rapid integration of new technologies into the banking services market, and the ability to help clients overcome the significant regulatory, compliance, organizational, and commercial challenges they face in this heavily regulated industry.

Together, we advise clients from concept to launch and beyond on planning, structuring, building, and protecting their go-to-market programs and platforms for conventional, digital, and technology-enabled banking solutions.

Our Clients

We help clients of all sizes across multiple sectors innovate and deliver digital banking products and services including:

• Financial institutions
• Banking-as-a-service platforms
• Fintech providers
• Digital asset companies
• US-based and foreign banks

Counsel for a Changing Market

Pioneering technologies, including blockchain, digital assets and tokenization, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and process automation, and financial and payment technologies, as well as digital banking, nonbanking, and open banking initiatives, continue to transform the financial services market. Regulators and supervisory agencies react and respond, striving to keep pace with technological innovation that often outstrips the current rules. We provide clients with informed counsel to help them navigate the regulatory and market changes occurring now — and anticipate the market of the future.

Program and Entity Formation and Chartering

Our skilled and knowledgeable banking lawyers guide clients in the structuring and formation of programs, partnerships, and entities that align their commercial objectives with the leanest possible regulatory, organizational, compliance, and management infrastructures. We help in assessing options for chartering and bank acquisitions; in structuring bank and nonbank partnerships; and in securing necessary licensing, registration, activities expansion, and chartering of de novo banks, limited-purpose trust companies, and industrial loan companies.

Development of Bank Products and Services

Steptoe works with established market participants and emerging companies across the banking, fintech, technology, and digital assets sectors. We help develop, structure, and launch commercially smart and legally compliant products and programs across deposit, credit, borrowing, lending, payments, asset tokenization, and conventional and digital custodial services.

Banking-as-a-Service Programs and Partnerships

Our lawyers work with parties on all sides of banking-as-a-service programs and partnerships — technology platforms and fintech providers, nonbank market entrants, and banks of all sizes — to facilitate, structure, and negotiate key arrangements and agreements.

Supervisory and Oversight Support

We support and advise clients on bank supervisory, oversight, and risk management issues, and in regulatory examinations and related findings and inquiries by agencies including, but not limited to, the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), and the state banking and financial services authorities.