In a letter sent to banking regulators last week, Republican members of the Senate Banking Committee called upon the agencies to “consider shortcomings related to the Matters Requiring Attention (MRAs) framework.”
The letter raised concerns that, currently, the MRA process is “increasingly opaque, ineffective and inconsistent,” lacking “structure, uniformity and legal basis.”
The letter noted that MRAs are not explicitly mentioned in any law or regulation and were instead developed by regulators through informal guidance, without public notice or comment. The lack of formality or clarity, they said, “can create confusion for financial institutions, particularly around expectations for remediations, severity of findings and regulatory consequences.”
“As we have seen with matters relating to ‘reputational risk,’ regulators have relied on overly broad tools to keep banks in a perpetual state of uncertainty,” said IBAT President and CEO Christopher Williston. “Providing banks with a clear path to remediation in the MRA process is a commonsense ask with which banking regulators should certainly comply,” he added.
The letter concluded by urging the agencies to improve the MRA framework as part of “broader efforts to bring integrity and accountability back to federal bank supervision.”
