Global Financial Markets

For the past several years, the False Claims Act has been at the forefront of enforcement efforts involving Federal Housing Administration (FHA)-approved mortgagees by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the US Department of Justice (DOJ). This week, HUD released proposed changes to its loan-level certifications and final changes to its annual certifications and defect taxonomy with the stated goal of addressing some of the uncertainty FHA lenders face in connection with the False Claims Act. Mayer Brown partner Krista Cooley discusses.

There is lots of news coming out of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) these days, spanning a gamut of topics, from constitutional issues to personnel changes. Mayer Brown partners Ori Lev and Stephanie Robinson discuss the developments of the past few months, including the surprising agency decision to assert that it is unconstitutionally structured and developments in supervision, enforcement and rulemaking.

The expected phase-out of LIBOR will affect trillions of dollars in investments across a wide range of financial products. The market has been working to adapt new transactions to a post-LIBOR world, but legacy transactions will also be affected. Whether and how those contracts can be modified to account for the unavailability of LIBOR - and how courts will respond to the changed facts - are open questions. Mayer Brown partners Matthew Ingber, Chris Houpt and Sagi Tamir discuss the current efforts to replace LIBOR, litigation risks that market participants may face, and how to plan for those risks.

The US federal banking and functional regulators are finalizing revisions to the proprietary trading and compliance program provisions of the Volcker Rule, which implement some, though not all, of the changes that had been proposed by the agencies in a May 2018 notice of proposed rulemaking. Mayer Brown lawyers David Sahr, Donald Waack and Matthew Bisanz discuss.

Retirement plans operated by US employers collectively hold trillions of dollars in assets, so they have naturally become a target for litigation under their governing statute, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, commonly known as ERISA. Under ERISA, plan fiduciaries are subject to duties of loyalty and prudence, which can be enforced by the US Department of Labor or by private civil actions. Class actions targeting ERISA plan fiduciaries have been on the rise. Financial institutions are potentially implicated for the plans that they provide to their own employees and for the services that they provide to their clients. Mayer Brown partners Nancy Ross and Brian Netter discuss recent trends in ERISA litigation.

In July 2019, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) proposed changes to its securitization safe harbor rule, which relates to the treatment of financial assets transferred in connection with a securitization or participation transaction. Mayer Brown partners Haukur Gudmundsson, Jan Stewart and Jeff Taft discuss.

The Brexit process seems to have been going nowhere fast for two years. But now, with a new prime minister and the increasing chance of a no-deal Brexit, it looks more and more likely that departure from the European Union will take place on October 31, 2019. The departure of the UK from the EU would be the first stage of a fundamental change in how the UK operates in the world and how businesses will need to operate in and with the UK. Mayer Brown partner Chris Chapman and counsel Chris Roberts discuss this important issue.

Mayer Brown partners Brad Peterson and Stephanie Duchene as they discuss various types of insurtech collaborations, from simple technology licensing to complex platform deals, and the accompanying regulatory and contractual issues to consider in each.

Six months into Kathy Kraninger's tenure as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency seems to be settling into its new rhythm and has been busy on the regulatory and enforcement front, while personnel changes create opportunities for Kraninger to shape the Bureau for years to come. In this episode Ori Lev and Stephanie Robinson examine the issues.

Despite everyone's best efforts, things will sometimes go wrong with AI systems, and the parties involved may find themselves in litigation or arbitration. When this happens, the parties will need to peer into the black box to reconstruct what the computer did and why it did it. But the usual electronic discovery tools and evidentiary principles for electronic records might not work for an AI system, especially a machine learning system that continuously learns based on new data. During this episode Eric Evans, Reginald Goeke and Alex Lakatos discuss some of these challenges.