Raymond J. Gustini’s practice focuses on bank transaction, regulatory and compliance matters, where he has advised banks on mergers, consumer and safety soundness, compliance, and enforcement issues. He is a member of Nixon Peabody’s Global Finance Group and heads its Financial Institutions Advisory Team (FIAT). He served from 2001 to 2005 as co-chair of an American Bar Association Joint Task Force on Privacy and of the Subcommittee on Electronic Privacy of the ABA’s Cyberspace Law Committee.
Before entering private practice, he worked in the United States Senate, as staff counsel to Senator Thomas J. Dodd (D-CT). Later he worked for the National Association of Securities Dealers in its Office of General Counsel (where he was primarily involved in enforcement and matters related to NASDAQ®) and was associate Washington counsel for the United States League of Savings Institutions in Washington, DC, for nine years.
Mr. Gustini has over 30 years of banking experience at the national level counseling financial institutions throughout the U.S. on mergers, formation of new banks, federal legislative matters, corporate governance, board of director issues and a wide variety of bank compliance issues, including Sarbanes-Oxley, consumer finance issues, and the USA Patriot Act. He has also represented troubled financial institutions facing formal and informal enforcement actions. He has represented numerous mutual associations and underwriters in connection with going public transactions and special committees of boards in going private transactions. He also served for seven years as a faculty member of the National School of Banking, where he lectured on bank mergers. He serves on the American Bankers Association’s Subchapter S Advisory Committee and its LLAC Committee.
He has been a frequent speaker before dozens of national and state banking trade organizations and bar groups and has appeared on CNNfn and MSNBC on banking and privacy-related issues such as the USA Patriot Act. He is the author of numerous articles on banking matters, and has testified before Congress on the structure of financial institutions. He currently serves as a director of Western Community Bancshares, Inc. (and its subsidiary Frontier Bank FSB) of Park City, Utah, where he chaired the Compensation Committee of its board of directors for ten years.