Yesterday, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announced several key reforms aimed at addressing regulatory burden for community banks.
These actions build upon the OCC’s continued efforts to tailor its regulatory and supervisory frameworks to minimize burden for its regulated institutions and promote economic growth.
The OCC’s announcement includes several key reforms:
- Return to Risk-Based Supervision: Elimination of fixed examination requirements in favor of a risk-based approach, ensuring that supervisory expectations align with actual institutional risk.
- Simplified Oversight of Retail Nondeposit Investment Products (NDIPs): Using the core assessment standards in the Community Bank Supervision booklet of the Comptroller’s Handbook to streamline the examination process for these products.
- Tailored Model Risk Management: Clarification that model validation requirements do not require community banks to perform annual model validations.
- Licensing Reform: A proposed rule to automatically deem community banks with less than $30 billion in total assets as “covered institutions” in relation to licensing requirements, expediting licensing processes such as branch applications.
- Fair Housing Data System Rescission: A proposed rule to eliminate legacy fair housing data-collection systems.
