Lobbying World

• Brian Tate next week will become the first in-house lobbyist for the Network Branded Prepaid Card Association. He is the vice president of banking for the Financial Services Roundtable. Prior to joining the Roundtable in 2009, he worked at the Maryland and D.C. Credit Union Association and the Credit Union National Association. He also spent more than three years on Capitol Hill, working for Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) and then-Rep. Max Sandlin (D-Texas).

• SIFMA named Ira D. Hammerman as its executive vice president and general counsel. He has been serving as the trade group’s senior managing director and general counsel for almost a decade. Hammerman, who has three decades of experience, will now manage the organization’s advocacy and legal work.

{mosads}• The Western Governors’ Association hired three new people to handle legislative and policy efforts. Laura Wilkeson, a former aide to Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), has become the organization’s manager of federal relations in Washington. Katie Kalinowski and Chris Scolari will be policy advisers in Denver.

• Former Senate staffer Jared Bomberg has become an associate in Hogan Lovells’ Washington office. He was previously an adviser to the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, where he specialized in consumer safety, deceptive and unfair practices and data security issues.

• Akin Gump hired Dario J. Frommer as a partner in the firm’s public law and policy practice in Los Angeles, leading the firm’s efforts in the state and advising clients with interests in Sacramento and Washington, D.C. He comes from the law firm Mayer Brown, but spent years in high-level posts in state government, including serving as the majority leader for the California State Assembly and working for former California Gov. Gray Davis (D).

• Benjamin Diehl joined the Los Angeles office of the national law firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan and will focus on its financial services litigation and government relations practices. He spent more than a decade in the California attorney general’s office, where he took the lead in litigating cases brought by the attorney general’s Mortgage Fraud Strike Force.