Stephen F. Ambrose, Jr.
Partner
505 Fifth Avenue • 28th Floor
New York, NY 10017
T. 212·542·1630
F. 866·831·8133
Steve Ambrose, Partner-in-Charge of BuckleySandler’s New York office, has 30 years experience in counseling clients on banking, credit card, mortgage and other consumer financial services transactional, regulatory and public policy matters. Mr. Ambrose held various general counsel positions at GE Capital for the past 20 years, most recently as General Counsel for GE Money, Americas, where he led the legal, compliance and governmental relations functions serving GE Capital’s consumer finance and banking units in the U.S., Canada and Latin America.
Mr. Ambrose has extensive transactional experience in mergers and acquisitions, portfolio acquisitions and divestitures, private label and co-brand card operating and marketing agreements, joint ventures, commercial lending and restructuring arrangements as well as strategic servicing and outsourcing agreements. His transactional experience has included acquisitions of financial services businesses in the U.S. and other countries (e.g. Canada, UK, Scandinavia, Japan, Australia, Germany and Poland), joint ventures in the U.S. and Latin America (e.g. Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Panama) and numerous credit card portfolio acquisition and operating agreements with retailers, dealers and manufacturers. Mr. Ambrose also has significant experience in the outsourcing of servicing for financial services businesses, having led his team in addressing cross-border legal issues and establishment of compliance operating frameworks for various groundbreaking customer service and collection outsourcing arrangements in the industry (e.g. India).
Mr. Ambrose has also had significant experience throughout his career in compliance and regulatory matters in the banking and consumer financial services arena, including credit card, personal loan, mortgage and vehicle financing. He has counseled clients on compliance with the full panoply of federal and state regulation, including truth-in-lending, privacy, equal credit opportunity/fair lending, fair credit reporting, debt collection practices, community reinvestment, affiliate transactions, and state usury and licensing laws. He has represented clients in various federal and state investigations and enforcement matters.
Mr. Ambrose has developed numerous compliance programs throughout his career. Utilizing both six sigma and process management disciplines, he led his team in developing a comprehensive and systematic Early Warning, Law Monitoring and Compliance Risk Management System, and establishing an offshore legal services center in India to provide compliance and contract administration support to the U.S. legal team.
Mr. Ambrose currently serves as Chairman of the Law Committee of the American Financial Services Association (AFSA), the national trade association for the consumer credit industry with over 350 member companies. He previously served as Credit Card Subcommittee Chairman for AFSA for six years.
Mr. Ambrose is a Fellow of the American College of Consumer Financial Services Lawyers, a national society of lawyers preeminent in the consumer financial services field who are selected for admission. He is also a Governing Committee Member of the Conference on Consumer Finance Law, and a member of the American Bar Association and its Consumer Financial Services Committee. He has co-authored an annual article on Significant Consumer Privacy Litigation in the Business Lawyer’s Annual Survey of Consumer Financial Services Law starting in 1999. He has also been a member of the Financial Services Roundtable Lawyers Council.
Mr. Ambrose received a B.S. Economics, cum laude, from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania in 1976, and his J.D. from Fordham University Law School in 1979, where he served as an Editor of the Fordham Law Review.
