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• 9/6/2022

In the last several years, fintech firms and other novel financial firms have expressed interest in obtaining master accounts and services with the Federal Reserve. After several proposals and rounds of comments from interested parties, the Federal Reserve Board in mid-August finalized guidelines for evaluating nontraditional financial institutions’ requests to be granted master accounts and access to the Fed’s payment services.

• 7/28/2022

In mid-June, the Federal Reserve released the Expected Losses Estimator (ELE), a spreadsheet-based tool designed to help community banks calculate their allowances for credit losses under the new Current Expected Credit Losses (CECL) accounting standard. As with the SCALE tool released last summer, the ELE will assist small and less complex banks in complying with CECL.

• 6/27/2022

U.S. banking conditions remained strong overall in the second half of 2021, with robust capital and liquidity, in addition to improved asset quality. That’s the conclusion of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, which recently released its latest Supervision and Regulation Report (PDF). The semiannual report covers banking system conditions, as well as regulatory and supervisory developments for the institutions under the Fed’s supervisory umbrella.

• 5/11/2022

Last week, the three federal banking agencies—the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation—released an interagency proposal that would revise banking regulations related to the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The CRA was passed in 1977 and the last major revisions to CRA regulations occurred almost 20 years ago.

• 4/4/2022

U.S. commercial banks continued their bounce back from pandemic-related challenges in 2021, recording satisfactory levels of earnings and asset quality measures well above industry benchmarks. Banks in Eighth Federal Reserve District states fared better too, with profitability and asset quality averages largely in line with national peers.