Maria (Masha) Smith
Counsel
Washington, D.C.
masha.smith@lw.com
+1.202.637.2199
PRACTICES
- Capital Markets
- Emerging Companies & Growth
- Mergers & Acquisitions
- Private Equity
- Technology Transactions
INDUSTRIES
- Financial Institutions
- Fintech
EDUCATION
- JD, Cornell Law School, 2000
cum laude - BA, Marlboro College, 1996
LANGUAGES SPOKEN
- Russian
PROFILE
Masha Smith advises companies and financial institutions on complex transactions and general corporate matters, particularly within the fintech industry.
A versatile corporate practitioner, Masha counsels US and international clients on diverse types of transactions ranging from joint ventures and M&A deals to consortiums, strategic alliances, and private equity investments, to capital markets and financing matters. She also regularly drafts and negotiates complex commercial contracts, including master services agreements, customer and vendor contracts, user agreements, and intellectual property licenses. A native Russian speaker, Masha offers particular experience in cross-border matters — including transactions involving entities in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Masha has advised on a number of notable matters within the fintech and financial services spaces. Her broad industry experience also includes the information technology, energy, mining, oil and gas, logistics, and retail and consumer products sectors.
EXPERIENCE
Masha’s representative experience includes advising:
Fintech / Financial Services Experience
- MEMX, which intends to launch a new equities exchange, on its creation and funding by a leading global market maker, Virtu, BAML, Morgan Stanley, UBS, E*TRADE, Fidelity, Schwab, and TD Ameritrade*
- R3 and a consortium of 44 global financial institutions in their initial collaborative exploration of distributed ledger and blockchain technology, followed by representation of R3 in the largest-ever investment in distributed ledger technology*
- Trumid Financial in the launch of a new alternative trading system (ATS)*
- Trumid Financial in multiple fundraising rounds, including funding from George Soros, Peter Thiel, Delphi Financial Group, CreditEase Fintech Investment Fund, and Hillhouse Capital*
- Eight leading commercial and investment banks in their investment in a data exchange, and accompanying restructuring regarding privacy and third-party technology service provider arrangements*
- Credit Suisse in a joint venture with Tower Research to create Wake USA for the fixed-income trading space*
- ICAP and its wholly owned subsidiary Traiana in the sale of an equity stake in Traiana to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Citi, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan, Nomura, and Royal Bank of Scotland*
- Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citi, Commerzbank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, and J.P. Morgan as liquidity providers of FXSpotStream (a multibank spot FX price aggregation service provider), and the equity holders in creating LiquidityMatch (the parent holding company of FXSpotStream), a majority of which equity holders are also liquidity providers*
Other Industry Experience
- Ricoh, a Japanese multinational imaging and electronics company, in its acquisition of a US technology company*
- OpenText, a NASDAQ and Toronto Stock Exchange-listed provider of information technology, in its acquisition of Informative Graphics*
- Verisign in numerous dispositions of non-core business lines*
- A diamond mining company in international joint ventures in Angola and Sierra Leone*
* Matter handled prior to joining Latham