Joseph M. Vincent

Biography

Joseph M. Vincent has been, since March 2003, Director of Regulatory & Legal Affairs and a member of the Executive Team of the Washington Department of Financial Institutions. In those capacities, Professor Vincent has acted as in-house counsel to the agency's director and the principal legal and regulatory adviser to the Division of Banks and Division of Credit Unions (which charter and supervise state-chartered banks, credit unions, and trust companies), he has been the principal in-house legal and regulatory adviser on agency-wide matters, and he has acted as the agency director's executive advisory reviewing officer at the appellate level of administrative adjudications involving the agency. In addition, Vincent's role at the Department has involved extensive policy-making and drafting of many of the agency's most significant legislative and rule-making initiatives over the last decade and a half, including the Washington Trust Modernization Act of 2014, the Washington Trust Act Amendments of 2015 (in collaboration with the Washington Bar Association), the 2013 Modernization of the Lending Limits Rule (including the Derivatives Rule), the Washington Commercial Bank & Savings Bank Modernization Amendments of 2010, and the implementation of Initiative 502 and subsequent cannabis-related legislation in relation to banking and other financial services.

Prior to his government career as a financial institutions regulator, Professor Vincent was in private practice in Seattle as a civil litigator for 6 years, served as Legal & Regulatory Manager for 11 years (and also Loan Administration Manager for 7 of those same years) for Washington Federal Savings (now Washington Federal, N.A.), and was then a principal in two information-technology startups for a total of 5 years, one devoted to an innovative computerized loan information system (CLIS) in the residential-mortgage space and the other focused on providing digital signature solutions using public key infrastructure (PKI). During this period, Vincent also launched and managed a unique, cooperative-based mortgage brokerage which utilized the afore-mentioned CLIS in real-time.

Professor Vincent co-developed, with Professor Ryan Straus, the seminal concept for what has eventually become the Fin-Tech cluster of the LLM/MLS Program in Innovation & Technology Law, and Vincent has also served as a member of that program's Board of Advisers. He co-chairs the State Law Developments Subcommittee of the Banking Law Committee (Business Law Section) of the American Bar Association, is active as a regulatory lawyer affiliated with the Conference of State Bank Supervisors (CSBS) and the National Association of State Credit Union Supervisors (NASCUS), was Chair of the Attorney's Committee for the former Washington Financial League, was Legislative/Legal Committee Chair for the former Seattle Mortgage Bankers Association, and represented the banking and lending communities on several ad hoc committees, including the Secretary of State's original work group that drafted the Washington Electronic Authentication Act and the Legislature's ad hoc committee that drafted a modernization of Washington's construction lien law.

Professor Vincent was graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and received his Juris Doctor degree from Golden Gate University School of Law. He is admitted to practice in Washington State.