Our People

Wenchi Hu is a highly experienced lawyer and trusted adviser. She has over two decades' experience in financial services, financial regulatory and complex transactions. She has counseled many securities market participants, including clearing agencies, broker-dealers, investment advisers, and fintech companies on complex financial regulatory and compliance issues.  

Before founding her own firm, she was a financial regulatory partner at Latham and Watkins, LLP. Prior to that, she served as Associate Director and Head of Office of Clearance and Settlement Supervision in the Division of Trading and Markets at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), overseeing registered clearing agencies within the national clearance and settlement system, including those that are designated systemically important in the equity, options, U.S. Treasury and mortgage-backed securities, and security-based swap markets. During her tenure, she oversaw more than 150 clearing agency initiatives and proposed rule changes, including National Securities Clearing Corporation's Accelerated Trade Guaranty, Fixed Income Clearing Corporation's permanent adoption of its GCF repo pilot program, suspension of the GCF repo interbank program, and its institutional triparty repo central clearing proposal to provide solutions to decreased liquidity in the treasury market by expanding offering of direct access to central clearing to institutional cash lenders beyond banks and broker-dealers, and ICE Clear Credit's default management, recovery and wind-down rule change. She also oversaw LCH SA's application for registration as a security-based swap clearing agency, the first by a non-U.S. clearing house. Before working in the Office of Clearance and Settlement, she was a senior special counsel in the Office of Derivatives Policy of the Division of Trading and Markets leading the SEC's Dodd Frank Title VII cross-border rulemaking. 

Over the years at the SEC, she developed deep knowledge in clearing and intermediary matters involving a wide spectrum of products across the securities market. Through her experience in supervising clearing agencies, she is intimately familiar with the SEC’s self-regulatory organization regulatory regime, CFTC’s rule submission framework, and the enhanced supervisory framework with respect to systemically important financial market utilities under Title VIII of the Dodd-Frank Act. During 2013-2015, she was the point person at the SEC exclusively responsible for CDS clearing. She represented the SEC to participate in ICE Clear Europe’s global supervisory college hosted by The Bank of England. From 2012 to 2013, she played an instrumental role in SEC’s Title VII rulemaking. She was intimately involved in the treatment of guaranty of swaps and security-based swaps in the Title VII product definition adopting release, and was a key player in SEC’s proposed rulemaking with respect to applying Dodd-Frank Title VII requirements to security-based swap dealers in the cross-border context, with a particular focus on application of capital, margin, and segregation requirements to foreign-based dealers. 

Before working at the SEC, she was a Managing Director and Senior Counsel at Rabobank New York Branch, responsible for managing the legal risk of the bank's U.S. financial market business. She started her career working as an associate in the New York and Hong Kong Offices of the international law firm Cleary Gottlieb.

She has served as a public director on the Board of OneChicago, a futures exchange regulated jointly by the CFTC and SEC.   

Wenchi is a member of the steering committee of DC Bar's Corporation, Finance and Securities Law Community and serves as the Vice Chair of the Broker-Dealer Subcommittee. She frequently speaks and writes about financial regulations and is a recognized practitioner in securities regulations, FinTech, and regulatory compliance.
 

Admissions:

District of Columbia and New York

Education: 

University of California-Berkeley School of Law, J.D., Order of Coif

Harvard Law School, LL.M.

National Taiwan University, LL.B.