On January 26, 2016, Venable hosted a webinar with Bloomberg BNA titled "Community and Small Regional Bank Mergers." The webinar offered practical insights on issues that arise in community and small, regional bank mergers. Moderated by partner Ron Glancz, the webinar also featured partners John Beaty and Mike Schiffer. Bloomberg BNA and SNL Financial featured several quotes from the webinar in January 26 articles.
During the webinar Schiffer recommended that banks looking to merge be upfront with regulators about their plans and strategy. "If you're a bank looking to sell yourself, having frank discussions with the regulators is helpful to you because it may alert you to early issues that you're never going to get around. By having some early indications from regulators of concerns they may have, it may put you in a position to mitigate those issues before you get too far down the path," he said. "Why waste the time of negotiating an agreement if there's such underlying issues with your own bank that the regulators are unlikely to approve any transaction?"
Discussing the implementation of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, Beaty said, "There are some rules still to come, but the uncertainty that has existed over the prior years has been greatly reduced…We are seeing a quieting down of the regulatory angst. Now, of course, we can go back to our normal angst about what is Congress going to do but hopefully that will be another year before we see major changes that way."