All Things FinReg

The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on January 29 proposed meaningful revisions to its rules and processes for reviewing proposed transactions involving national banks under the Bank Merger Act. The proposed amendments would notably remove the expedited application review process and associated OCC streamlined business combination application, replacing them with a policy statement that outlines the principles the OCC plans to use when evaluating merger applications, including a number of proposed indicia that support approval and, potentially, denial.

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve) took another tepid step into the digital asset space on August 8, announcing that it has established a program to “enhance the supervision of novel activities conducted by banking organizations supervised” by the Federal Reserve. In addition, the Federal Reserve issued guidance explaining the supervisory nonobjection process for state member banks “seeking to engage in certain activities involving tokens denominated in national currencies and issued using distributed ledger technology or similar technologies to facilitate payments.”

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) continued the focus shown over the last several months, and especially since the March 2023 failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and associated events, by the federal banking agencies on uninsured deposits when it issued a Financial Institution Letter (FIL), Estimated Uninsured Deposits Reporting Expectations, on July 24, 2023.

Congress has enacted and President Joseph Biden has signed a joint resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC’s) “true lender” rule, which, as we previously discussed, had provided that a national bank is as a matter of law the lender on any loan for which it is the named lender or for which it provides the loan funding.

Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) introduced a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution of disapproval on March 26 that would invalidate the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s (OCC’s) true lender final rule.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued a final rule on October 27 that determines when a national bank or federal savings association (bank) makes a loan and is the “true lender” in the context of a partnership between a bank and a third party, such as a marketplace lender.

In a series of recent interviews (including with the American Bankers Association and a podcast with the ABA Banking Journal), Acting Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks discussed the Office of the Comptroller’s (OCC’s) plans to soon roll out another special purpose national bank (SPNB) charter specifically geared toward payments companies.