Banking and insurance
Statutory and committee work affecting chartered institutions, captives, reinsurance, and related products.
Texas Government Affairs Specialty
Financial Services Policy & Government Affairs in Texas
Financial-services legislation often turns on highly technical rules whose effects extend far beyond statutory language. Em Dash Strategies provides Texas lobbying and government affairs representation informed by directing the House committee that hears much of that work.
Work
How Em Dash Helps
Investments and public funds
Public Funds Investment Act issues, state fund investment policy, and how local governments invest.
FinTech and payments
New products that still have to fit inside old committee jurisdiction.
Digital assets as finance
Custody, reserves, and state investment experiments treated as financial services, not as a side quest.
Legislative analysis
Reading the technical rule — the definition, the exemption, the audit duty — that actually changes a business.
Committee process
How financial bills are prepared, witnessed, amended, and coordinated with the Senate and regulators.
Institutional background
Experience that informs the work
This is one of the practice’s strongest institutional pages: Katy directed the House Committee on Pensions, Investments & Financial Services, and she brought appropriations experience to the same set of issues.
Committee Director
House Committee on Pensions, Investments & Financial Services
February 2023 – February 2025
Committee Director
House Committee on Appropriations
January 2020 – January 2021
Chief of Staff / Capitol Director
Representative Giovanni Capriglione
November 2014 – August 2026
Record
Selected legislative & policy experience
Financial services here is broader than digital assets. The examples below are chosen to show that range.
Public Funds Investment Act
Money-market and investment-procedure updates for public funds.
Captive insurance
Captive insurance and reinsurance policy — a technical insurance file with real capital consequences.
Public funds investment
Further Public Funds Investment Act and investment issues.
Economic Stabilization Fund
Investment-policy reform for the Rainy Day Fund.
Digital asset custody
Service-provider and customer-protection rules that landed as financial legislation.
Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
A state investment experiment that still has to be explained as public-finance policy.
Transaction rebate tax treatment
Tax treatment of transaction rebate payments involving stock exchanges and members — market-structure detail with fiscal effects.
Landscape
Navigating financial services policy in Texas
The danger in financial-services advocacy is treating the caption as the bill. A two-page amendment to investment procedure can move more money than a speech about innovation. Captive insurance language can change who may bear risk. A rebate-tax provision can alter the economics of a market-structure product without ever using the word “securities” in a way a non-specialist would notice.
That is why committee staff experience matters here. The work is to isolate the operative rule, identify the regulator who will inherit it, and explain the downstream effect to offices that may only see the bill for a week. Stakeholder lists in this field are long: banks, insurers, public-fund investors, FinTechs, exchanges, and now digital-asset platforms. They do not want the same outcome.
Appropriations experience is part of the same craft. Some financial-policy changes are free in fiscal-note terms and expensive in the real world. Some require a rider. Knowing the difference keeps a client from winning a policy fight and losing the implementation.
Organizations
Who we help
Banks and insurers
Institutions watching technical amendments that do not look technical in a press release.
Investment and funds businesses
Firms affected by public-funds rules or state investment-policy debates.
FinTech and payments
Companies whose product is new and whose committee is old.
Market-structure firms
Exchanges and related businesses whose Texas issue may be tax, disclosure, or investment law.
Digital asset finance
Custodians and platforms that are, in Texas, often financial-services clients.
Associations
Groups that have to reconcile members with conflicting balance sheets and identical bill numbers.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Who handles financial services lobbying in Texas?
Em Dash Strategies is an Austin-based Texas lobbying firm led by Katy Aldredge, who served as Committee Director of the House Committee on Pensions, Investments & Financial Services from February 2023 to February 2025. The practice covers banking, insurance, investments, securities-adjacent issues, FinTech, public funds, payments, and the digital-asset statutes that now sit in the same building.
What experience does Katy Aldredge have with financial services policy?
Beyond directing the Pensions, Investments & Financial Services Committee, Katy’s staff work included Public Funds Investment Act updates, captive insurance and reinsurance policy, Economic Stabilization Fund investment reform, digital asset custody rules, the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and tax treatment of certain stock-exchange transaction rebate payments. She also directed the House Appropriations Committee, which is often where financial-policy ideas meet the cost of implementing them.
What does the Texas Legislature regulate in financial services?
More than people outside the process expect. Public-funds investment procedure, insurance structures such as captives, state fund investment policy, digital asset service providers, and tax treatment of market-structure payments have all been live legislative files. The Legislature also overlaps with federal law and with state regulators. A bill caption that says “finance” may actually be about pensions, banking, insurance, or a novel asset class.
Can Em Dash work with FinTech companies?
Yes. FinTech issues in Texas rarely arrive labeled as such. They arrive as payments, data, custody, lending, or insurance questions assigned to a financial committee or to an agency with a financial charter. The firm’s job is to place the product on that map and then run a conventional legislative and agency process around it.
Does Em Dash handle both traditional financial services and digital assets?
Yes, and it treats them as a connected file rather than as two websites. HB 1666 and SB 21 were financial-policy instruments. So were older Public Funds Investment Act and Rainy Day Fund investment bills. Clients that straddle both worlds should not have to hire two theories of the Texas Legislature.
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Related specialties
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