With more than 25 years of dedicated experience advising and representing financial services companies, David Thompson’s career is perfectly balanced between helping financial services clients address problems as they arise and working to prevent them in the first place. David understands the constraints on the consumer financial services industry, which is highly regulated by laws, network rules, and contractual relationships that are complex and ever-changing. David works to ensure that financial services clients balance their goals for sustainable growth with effective strategies to manage risk, resolve conflicts with customers and administrative agencies, and develop appropriate terms for agreements with customers and other businesses. David thrives on understanding how these details affect financial services clients, working closely with them to prevent and solve their problems, and using plain language that clients and their customers can understand.
David is also the Managing Member of the firm’s Cleveland office; a member of the firm’s Consumer Financial Services, Banking Counsel, and E-Commerce sections; and a leader in the firm’s Cybersecurity and Data Privacy section. Although David is a Kentucky native and admitted to practice law in the state, he learned to suppress his Kentucky accent years ago while living in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and working there as Counsel for Fleet Financial Group. After working in Ohio for more than 20 years, David now has a nondescript Midwestern accent that makes him sound like an Ohio native, except when the University of Kentucky Wildcats advance past the second round of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament.
Consumer Financial Services; Privacy and Information Security
David advises and represents a broad range of financial services companies that vary in size, product offerings, staffing, and supervision. Most share a desire to grow, either by providing familiar products in new markets, offering products new to the company but familiar to competitors, or developing innovative products that are new in most markets. These financial services companies include regional and community banks with national and state charters that provide all forms of secured and unsecured loans and lines of credit to consumers and small businesses on a national or regional basis; licensed lenders, sales finance companies, and retail sellers that focus on a specific industry or single product; FinTech intermediaries and service providers, with and without bank participation; and startup companies that provide services and support for emerging technologies.
In David’s role as a trusted advisor to financial services companies, he counsels on a wide range of issues that relate to clients’ consumer lending and financing programs; information security and privacy; multistate licensing and consumer disclosure requirements; credit reporting; marketing; deposit products and payment systems; and electronic commerce. In this capacity, David advises clients about how to avoid risk and comply with the contractual, disclosure, and conduct requirements in federal laws such as the Truth in Lending Act (TILA), the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), the Electronic Fund Transfer Act (EFTA), the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), the CAN-SPAM Act, the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), the E-Sign Act, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA), and the Military Lending Act (MLA), as well as state law counterparts that may establish different requirements and protections for consumers.
Because David’s background also includes representing financial services clients in enforcement actions, investigations, supervisory responses, and civil litigation, he also provides practical advice about how to avoid or resolve conflicts with customers and with supervisory and enforcement agencies. David also represents clients in negotiating commercial contracts with service providers, business partners, commercial lenders, and parties that acquire an ownership interest in or servicing rights for consumer loans and extensions of credit.
Relevant Recent Experience
- Worked with regional and community banks on marketing, origination, and servicing consumer loan and line of credit products in footprint and out-of-footprint states (unsecured products, as well as those secured by deposit accounts, personal property, or real property); included work on consumer credit and security agreements, consents for use of electronic signatures and records, and review of banking powers and permitted rates and fees
- Worked with national banks and state-chartered banks on marketing, origination, and servicing of consumer credit cards and commercial credit cards issued on a national or regional basis; included work on privacy and information sharing consents and disclosures, development of commercial contracts for joint marketing and agent bank programs, and review of banking powers and permitted rates and fees
- Advised financial services companies about privacy and information sharing issues, including development of website and financial privacy notices that explain how companies share consumer information with affiliates and nonaffiliates
- Advised financial services companies about compliance with information security laws and rules, including how to identify, assess, and mitigate information security risks, comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, comply with federal and state breach notification requirements, and develop incident response and information security programs and training
- Advised FinTech companies on licensing, risk management, privacy, payment processing, origination, and servicing of unsecured consumer loans and lines of credit provided on a regional or nationwide basis, some with bank participation and others based on a direct lending program
- Advised automobile dealers and finance companies with regional and super-regional programs about marketing, licensing, risk management, retail installment contracts, payment processing, electronic contracting servicing, information security, and privacy
- Prepared responses to civil investigative demands and administrative requests for information relating to privacy and information security issues, including use of GPS and other technology for locating and disabling collateral
- Worked on vendor management programs for banks and development of service provider contracts, including those relating to marketing, account servicing, credit reporting, and payment processing
- Counseled licensed lenders regarding licensing, prescreened credit, and live-check marketing programs, as well as origination, payment processing, and servicing of precomputed and simple-interest installment loans, some unsecured and others secured by personal property including motor vehicles
- Prepared amicus curiae appellate brief on issues relating to creditors that furnish trade line information to consumer reporting agencies about customers during and after bankruptcy
- Advised financial services clients about administration of residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs and other home improvement financing programs, on issues related to licensing, risk management, home solicitation sales, tax assessment contracts, credit and security agreements, and servicing, as well as commercial contracts with home improvement contractors