Tamika P. Bent
Counsel, Corporate & Financial Services
Tamika Bent is Counsel in Willkie’s Corporate & Financial Services Department and Structured Finance & Derivatives Practice Group.
She is a seasoned derivatives attorney with deep and extensive transactional and financial regulatory experience, including as in-house counsel at an investment bank and Chief Counsel to a Commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Tamika provides clients with practical solutions to their most sophisticated and complex legal issues. She represents funds, commercial end-users, banks, broker-dealers, swap dealers, security-based swap dealers, futures commission merchants, and trade associations.
In her transactional practice, Tamika structures and negotiates a broad range of agreements and transactions, including:
- ISDA Master Agreements and collateral documentation, MRAs, MSLAs and other industry-standard trading agreements and clearing documentation for cleared and uncleared swaps, repurchase transactions, and securities lending transactions;
- loan-linked and deal-contingent hedges in connection with financing agreements and mergers and acquisitions; and
- structured transactions, such as total return swaps and repurchase facilities.
She helps clients navigate the complexities of the U.S. regulatory environment by providing:
- transaction-adjacent advice in connection with derivatives transactions, from the mechanics of the ISDA Dodd-Frank Protocols to the intricacies of the uncleared margin rules;
- litigation support in connection with swap dealer examination and investigation and litigation risk assessment; and
- compliance counsel in connection with mergers and acquisitions and the interpretation and implementation of all aspects of derivatives regulations and rules adopted by the CFTC, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), National Futures Association (NFA), and Financial Regulatory Authority (FINRA).
Experience
Prior to joining Willkie, Tamika was Chief Counsel to Commissioner Kristin N. Johnson at the CFTC and led the CFTC’s Market Risk Advisory Committee. Tamika advanced the office’s priorities on cutting-edge issues, such as the proliferation of crypto derivatives, deployment of artificial intelligence in derivatives markets, disintermediation of clearing services, and adoption of vertically integrated market structures.
In addition to working at several leading law firms, Tamika was Senior Counsel and Executive Director at Natixis, a French corporate and investment bank, where she managed a team of lawyers and document negotiators covering derivatives transactional and related regulatory matters. Tamika also lectured for several years as an adjunct professor at New York Law School.
- Member, Women in Financial Markets
- Member, New York City Bar Association, Futures and Derivatives Regulations Committee, Working Group on Cryptocurrency and UCC, and Committee on Minorities in the Profession
- Member, New York State Bar Association, Derivatives and Structured Products Law Committee
- Member, ISDA Future Leaders in Derivatives Program, Technology and Innovation Workstream
- Member, American Bar Association, Part 190 Subcommittee
Publications
- Co-author, “The Ethics of Civility: The ‘New York Standards of Civility’ and the Derivatives Legal Community,” Futures & Derivatives Law Report, March 2023
- Co-author, “The Future of Derivatives Markets: A Roadmap for Innovation,” ISDA, May 2022
- Co-author, “ISDA Legal Guidelines for Smart Derivatives Contracts: Foreign Exchange Derivatives,” ISDA, November 2020
Speaking Engagements
- Speaker, “Scanning the Horizon: How to Prepare Your Business for New Regulations,” FIA Law & Compliance Division Conference, National Harbor, MD, April 2024
- Speaker, “AI-Related Risks,” CFTC, MRAC, Future of Finance Subcommittee Meeting, Washington, DC, March 2024
- Speaker, “Importance of Regulatory Clarity,” Office of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, DC’s Pathway to Crypto Innovation, Live Webcast, February 2024
- Speaker, “Climate-Related Market Risk,” CFTC, MRAC Meeting, Washington, DC, December 2023
- Speaker, “Steps to Diversity and Inclusion,” ISDA Annual Legal Forum, New York, NY, October 2023
- Speaker, “LIBOR Transition: Are We Done Yet?,” FIA Law & Compliance Division Conference, Washington, DC, April 2023
- Speaker, “Ethics,” ABA Derivatives and Futures Law Committee Winter Meeting, Hilton Head Island, SC, February 2023
- Moderator, “Securitized Products,” PLI Understanding Financial Products 2023, New York, NY, January 2023
- Speaker, “Perspectives from Future Leaders,” ISDA 36th AGM, Madrid, Spain, May 2022
- Speaker, “CCP Risk Issues,” FIA Law & Compliance Division Conference, Washington, DC, April 2022
- Speaker and Moderator, “Capital Markets,” PLI Understanding Financial Products 2022, Live Webcast, January 2022
- Speaker, “Market Volatility and Impact on the Clearing System,” FIA Law & Compliance Division Conference (L&C-V), Virtual, On-Demand, April 2021
- Speaker, “Overview of Derivatives Products,” Fundamentals of Derivatives, ISDA, New York, NY, January 2020
- Speaker, “Rainmaking, Business Development/Client Relationships,” Associate Leadership Institute, NYCBA, New York, NY, May 2019
Transactional
- Lead attorney representing a French bank in connection with total return swaps to provide seed funding or non-qualified deferred compensation hedging in connection with various equity underliers, including shares of ‘40 Act investment companies and UCITS funds.
- Lead associate representing hedge providers and borrowers in connection with loan-linked hedging agreements relating to term loans and revolving credit facilities for transportation and space, leveraged finance, and project finance deals.
- Lead associate representing a consortium of banks and broker-dealers in connection with committed repurchase facilities with U.S.- and London-based central counterparties (CCPs) intended to satisfy the CFTC’s CCP liquidity requirements.
- Lead associate representing the London branch of a German bank in connection with a total return swap to finance or otherwise facilitate private equity acquisition of assets.
- Lead associate representing a British affiliate of a U.S. bank in connection with a repurchase facility to monetize its fund counterparty’s portfolio of highly illiquid debt securities.
- Lead associate representing a U.S. bank in connection with structured repurchase facilities involving the repackaging of loan portfolios into notes.
- Lead associate representing a U.S. bank in connection with a repurchase facility to monetize a portfolio of residential mortgage-backed securities.
- Key member of the team representing a dealer group in the restructuring of the $32 billion Canadian asset-backed commercial paper market, which was one of the largest restructuring of synthetic structured credit products.
Regulatory
- Lead associate drafting and submitting a comment letter on behalf of several Canadian pension plans and pension plan managers to the SEC on proposed rule 10c-1a, which requires the reporting of securities loans.
- Lead associate drafting policies, procedures, and manuals for swap dealers and non-registrants designed to comply with certain requirements of the Dodd-Frank Act, including to register as a swap dealer, elect the end-user exception, and comply with regulations on qualified financial contracts.
- Lead associate developing and managing the implementation of FIA Global’s CCP Risk Review tool, a leading comparative analysis of the rules, procedures, and other documents of CCPs around the world. The tool was shortlisted for the FT Innovative Lawyers Awards Europe 2015.
- Lead associate representing a trade association of the world’s largest banks, in its advocacy efforts before the Federal Reserve Board (FRB), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to establish an industry-standard form of qualifying CCP assessment for purposes of Basel III and the U.S. banking regulators’ capital rules.
- Lead associate advising a clearing member syndicate in redrafting the rules, procedures, and other documents of ICE Clear Europe Ltd. to implement customer clearing for credit default swaps and foreign currency swaps.
- Lead associate advising a clearing member syndicate in redrafting the rules, procedures, and other documents of ICE Clear Europe Ltd. and ICE Clear Credit LLC to implement end-of-waterfall and recovery and resolution provisions.
- Lead associate assisting clearing members in reviewing and analyzing the rules, procedures, and other documents of CCPs globally to assess clearing member liability in default scenarios.
*Tamika advised on some of these matters prior to joining Willkie.
Credentials
Education
HEC Paris, Executive Master of Science in Finance, 2018 Cornell Law School, J.D., 2007 Université Paris I - Panthéon-Sorbonne, French Master en Droit, 2007 SUNY at Albany, B.A., 2002