FRB

The Senate voted to confirm Michelle “Miki” Bowman for the Federal Reserve Board seat earmarked for someone with community banking experience. She is the first person confirmed for the seat since its creation during the Obama administration.

Her nomination has been championed by community banking trade groups, such as the Independent Community Bankers of America and the American Bankers Association, since it was announced in April.

Find out more details about her confirmation.

Streamlined call reports will become a reality for many more banks with the implementation of a new rule proposed by the federal banking agencies, as directed by S. 2155.

The proposal immediately met with criticism from the Independent Community Bankers of America, which argued that the agencies failed to fulfill the intent of Congress in lessening condition reporting burdens.

Find out more about the proposal and the industry’s initial take on it.

Banking agencies and other regulators are being urged to consider formal rulemaking to provide greater certainty pertaining to the use of supervisory guidance in examinations, which some industry advocates believe is too prevalent.

The letters note three reasons the banking trade organizations support the interagency policy statement but also detail their concerns about regulators’ perceived overreliance on guidance materials.

Find out more about why some industry organizations are calling for formal rulemaking to address this matter.

The Federal Reserve Board approved a proposal to implement new prudential standards to ease liquidity and capital requirements for banking entities that meet certain criteria for total assets and interconnectivity.

The proposal mainly would impact financial institutions with assets levels between $100 billion and $250 billion, and would not impact the largest, most complex financial entities.

Find out more about the proposal and its potential implications.

In effort to standardize how counterparty risk is calculated, the three federal banking regulators issued a proposed rule to establish a new approach that accounts for the exposure amount of derivative contracts under the regulatory capital rule.

The proposed “standardized approach for counterparty credit risk,” or SA-CCR, would be an alternative to the current exposure methodology for calculating advanced approaches total risk-weighted assets under the capital rule.

Find out more about the potential benefits of the new calculation method. 

The three federal banking agency members of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) has released 2017 lending data on small businesses, small farms and community development as required by the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).

The lending data included in the report was gathered from 718 commercial banks and savings associations by the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Read on to get more details about the collected data.

The financial industry has shown support for the prudential regulators’ recent joint statement detailing plans to more clearly distinguish between regulatory guidance and rules, but some experts see a quandary in that fact.

Garris Horn Managing Member Richard Horn told Dodd Frank Update that the industry’s support for the idea of ensuring that guidance does not have the force and effect of a rule could prove to be a double-edged sword.

Get an in-depth look at the potential positives and negatives of regulators’ new approach to guidance.

Twenty-nine Republican congressmen wrote to Federal Reserve Vice Chairman for Supervision Randal Quarles urging him to exercise the Fed’s discretionary authority to remove financial institutions with $250 billion or less in assets from federal regulators’ list of systemically-important financial institutions per the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (S. 2155).

Referencing comments by Quarles earlier in the year asserting that entities at or below that asset level generally do not present a systemic risk to the economy, the congressmen urged Quarles to no longer subject them to heightened supervisory requirements that come with a SIFI designation.

Find out more details about the letter from the congressmen and the remarks by Quarles it references.

The Federal Reserve Board is seeking feedback on what role it could play in facilitating faster payments. Specifically, the board is requesting recommendations for actions it could take to expedite the settlement of interbank payment and build on collaborative work with the payment industry through the Fed’s Strategies for Improving the U.S. Payment System (SIPS) initiative.

The Fed is considering two possible ways it could support round-the-clock faster payments in ways that would increase the resiliency and security of services offered to the public.

Find out more about the Fed’s request for comment and what the industry has said about it.

Two bipartisan bills that recently passed the House propose to limit federal oversight of insurance savings and loan holding companies and facilitate better cooperation between foreign and domestic financial crime units in working to root out cybercriminals.

H.R. 5059, also known as the “State Insurance Regulation Preservation Act,” and H.R. 6411, the “FinCEN Improvement Act of 2018,” both passed by voice vote and were sent to the Senate, where they were read twice and referred to the Senate Banking Committee.

Find out more about the two legislative pieces and what they propose.