Banking

Former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Rohit Chopra's act in government is poised to unfold on a new stage in California, but financial firms will likely recognize the script. Watch this space, attorneys tell Law360.

The publisher of the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday urged a Manhattan federal judge to deep six a defamation suit brought by Binance over reporting internal investigators at the crypto exchange who were allegedly fired after flagging Iranian sanctions violations, saying the company is just unhappy with the way the Journal reported the facts.

Oregon is pushing back against financial industry groups' request to halt the state's new law aimed at capping interest rates on loans from out-of-state banks, arguing the lender trade groups suing in federal court over this so-called opt-out law are trying to impose limits on it that Congress never intended.

In what the court called a "close and challenging call," the Seventh Circuit on Wednesday ruled the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. could use in-house proceedings to adjudicate claims of unsound banking practices, rejecting a former Illinois community bank chairman's contention that such proceedings violate his right to trial by jury.

Rithm Capital-owned mortgage servicer Newrez LLC will pay $15.5 million to resolve allegations that force-placed insurance charges were erroneously levied against customers, following a multistate mortgage loan servicing examination, according to an announcement Wednesday from the New York State Department of Financial Services.

The Ninth Circuit Wednesday affirmed a $12 million judgment to former students of bankrupt for-profit college ITT Education Services Inc., saying their RICO claims against student loan servicers weren't time-barred because evidence showed the students had no way of knowing they were being scammed more than four years before they filed suit.

Trinseo PLC and feuding creditor groups on Wednesday launched opening salvos at a hearing on the plastics maker's bid to trim $2 billion in debt under a Chapter 11 plan, kicking off a trial in Texas bankruptcy court expected to span three days.

PayPal on Wednesday beat for good a proposed class action over its alleged restrictive merchant agreements, with a California federal judge finding that the third version of the suit still fails to establish the consumers' standing to bring antitrust claims.

Kalshi intensified its push for the Second Circuit to shield it from a New York state lawsuit targeting its sports event contracts Wednesday, arguing a new U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission directive demonstrates the company's need for protection.

Alternative asset manager Aperture Investors is expanding its litigation finance platform to $1 billion in total investment capacity, mostly deployed as direct loans to plaintiffs firms.

Goldman Sachs said Wednesday that it has agreed to acquire NEOS Investments, a provider of options-based income exchange-traded funds, for up to $2.25 billion in cash and equity, in a transaction steered by three law firms.

Connecticut's banking and securities regulator has fined a onetime Raymond James investment adviser agent for borrowing $140,000 from a brokerage client, accepting $947,000 in gifts from two clients and making an inaccurate statement on a form she filed in connection with her job at Lincoln Investment, according to a consent order.

The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued an emergency order Tuesday evening telling Kalshi that, even if the state of New York wins a restraining order preventing the prediction market platform from offering event contracts, it should continue business as usual.

Merchant capital advance provider Yellowstone Capital LLC has lost its bid for coverage of costs incurred in a $1 billion settlement with the New York attorney general over claims that it gouged small businesses, as a New Jersey federal judge found Yellowstone's insurance policy excludes coverage for claims of unfair business practices.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's financial crimes unit on Tuesday issued a final rule permanently narrowing reporting regulations under the Corporate Transparency Act, enshrining a regulatory rollback that exempts domestic shell companies from reporting their beneficial ownership information.

A New Jersey federal court has prohibited an attorney from serving as class counsel in his proposed class action accusing a group of financial services companies of running a scheme driven by high commissions and undisclosed conflicts of interest, saying the suit can only be refiled if new class counsel is brought in.

Toronto-based payments company Moneris Solutions Corp. has agreed to be acquired by Francisco Partners Management LP for CA$2 billion ($1.44 billion), as joint owners Bank of Montreal and Royal Bank of Canada look to exit the business while keeping commercial ties, the companies said Monday.

A senior vice president at Wells Fargo told a North Carolina federal judge he was forced out of his position following biased evaluations and from his supervisor his age, disability and the race of his team members, in a new complaint filed Monday.

Nvidia, Goldman Sachs, KKR, Apollo Management, BlackRock, Brookfield and Blackstone are teaming up to spend over $500 billion in "third-party capital" on building artificial intelligence infrastructure, Nvidia announced.

Alexander Vik and his daughter have asked the Connecticut Supreme Court to spare them from a revived Deutsche Bank AG lawsuit that claims they disrupted a Norwegian software company's sale designed to partially satisfy a $243 million English court judgment, arguing a lower appeals court ruling was flawed.

An Oregon-led coalition of nearly a dozen states sued Tuesday to overturn the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's recent rules that exempt national banks from state laws requiring the payment of interest on homeowners' escrow account funds.

An international arbitration tribunal has largely rejected Bahrain's preliminary objections to claims brought by an Iranian state-owned oil company's trading arm over funds held in Bahraini banks, finding the company did not abuse the arbitration process by moving its corporate to Malaysia.

President Donald Trump's lawsuit against Capital One NA is a high-profile test of a bank's broad powers to unilaterally close accounts, an issue that has been "devastating" for companies, law firms and others booted from banks based on opaque compliance concerns, experts say.

A top U.S. banking regulator has waded into a proposed class action accusing Bank of America NA of unlawfully sharing customer information with law enforcement after the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack, arguing the bank can't use a key regulatory safe harbor to exit the case.

The National Credit Union Administration is poised for new leadership after senators on Friday confirmed Trump nominee John Crews to its board, whose acting Chairman Kyle Hauptman has departed for a seat on the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

Investment research service Muddy Waters LLC and its founder want a breach of contract claim cut from a suit alleging they stiffed a purported former partner out of his of a $14 million whistleblower award from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, saying the claim "crosses the line from pleading in the alternative to pleading in incoherence."

In Qatar National Bank v. South Sudan and Bank of South Sudan, a D.C. federal court recently confirmed a $1 billion arbitral award, but the judgment itself remains only the entrance to the asset-recovery exercise, says Josep Galvez at 4-5 Gray's Inn Square.

While government contracts law and the hardcore scene may seem entirely unrelated, in my experience, both are community, focus, being prepared for the unexpected and managing chaos, says Isaac Natter at Fluet.

The proposed elimination of a Securities and Exchange Commission rule that mandates a price benchmark for equity securities trades could allow blockchain-based trades to compete with legacy frameworks in registered markets, potentially serving as a test case for updated regulatory models, say Alex Zozos at Superstate, and Lewis Rinaudo Cohen and Edward Leaf at Cahill Gordon.

Banks should expect closer scrutiny of account closures and service denials after federal regulators recently stripped "reputation risk" from supervisory guidance, and should tie customer decisions to documented, objective legal and financial criteria to protect against debanking-related enforcement, say attorneys at Troutman.

Recent changes to the Graduate PLUS student loan program may moderate borrowing and simplify repayment, but they may also shift financial distress into a bankruptcy system whose treatment of educational debt remains largely unchanged, say Jaclynn McDonnell at Stevens & Lee.

The New York State Department of Financial Services' consent order with Swedbank reflects the department's broad view of its investigative authority, emphasizes transparency, and underscores the risks of intrusive investigations that can occur if a regulator believes that it was misled, say attorneys at Paul Hastings.

Private credit disputes will increasingly turn on whether lenders recognized enterprise-value risk and updated marks as borrower conditions changed, making valuation processes, trigger frameworks and portfolio oversight critical for investors and litigants, say Isil Erel at the Ohio State University and Farooq Javed at The Brattle Group.

Recent declinations and prosecution agreements between the U.S. Department of Justice and corporations since the March unveiling of the corporate enforcement and voluntary disclosure policy provide takeaways for management considering how to respond to corporate misconduct, says Brendan Quigley at Baker Botts.

A California state court's recent ruling in OppFi v. Hewlett offers fintech-bank partnerships a blueprint for structuring lending programs to withstand future true lender challenges, while signaling that enforcement theories may face added scrutiny under the state's ban on underground regulations, say attorneys at Womble Bond.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Trump v. Slaughter, expanding presidential control over those exercising executive power, suggests that courts may be receptive to arguments challenging the constitutional foundations of the False Claims Act’s qui tam mechanism, says Daniel Passeser at Wiggin.

The Ninth Circuit recently blocked the Financial Crimes Enforcement Unit's border cash reporting rule, interpreting it as an impermissible use of an emergency anti-money laundering tool, but regulators are more likely to see the opinion as a road map for building a more defensible rule, say attorneys at Bradley Arant.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently held in Sripetch v. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that disgorgement exists to strip a wrongdoer of unjust enrichment, not merely to compensate victims for what they lost, shifting the work at the center of securities fraud cases in five ways, says Rand Manasse at Green Lane Partners.

Being a sommelier has quietly shaped how I practice law by changing the way I think, communicate and connect with people, and offers a constant reminder that expertise is making your knowledge useful and accessible to others, says Kara Du at Sheppard.

As courts increasingly find that upstream parties are best positioned to detect red flags in fraud disputes, most recently in Yangtze v. Ohio Valley Trackwork, companies should tighten treasury and deposit agreement verification protocols, indemnity terms, and insurance coordination to reduce exposure, says Nadine Dorsht at Stinson.

The Federal Reserve Board's latest supervision and regulation report highlights that broad systemic stability will not insulate individual institutions from rigorous supervisory challenges regarding concentrated commercial real estate portfolios and nonbank partnerships, says Daniel Meade at Hogan Lovells.