All in Regulatory Update

Each month, the FDIC and OCC each release a list of banks that have been evaluated under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).  This information is extremely valuable to CRA officers as one of the best ways to understand the CRA requirements for a financial institution is to read the performance evaluations of other financial institutions of the same regulator. This article summarizes some of the key points from these evaluations.

On Tuesday, July 31, President Trump signed a four-month extension of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) into law. As has been the case several times this year, the NFIP was set to expire on 7/31/2018 if congress did not step up and renew the program.  Though the House of Representatives had passed the renewal a while back, the Senate did not extend the program until the last minute before the program was set to expire - at midnight on 7/31/18. This short term, temporary extension is the…

It’s never a good idea to “guess” how a new law will be incorporated into a regulation, but I have received quite a few questions regarding how small HMDA reporters will report HMDA data once the CFPB finalizes the changes required by the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act of 2018.  Therefore, I want to share my understanding of what I think is going to happen, though you should know full well that this is (mostly) just speculation until changes to Regulation C become final.

In January of 2018, FinCEN provided an announcement that a new version of the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) will be modified and available for use in June of 2018.  It is our understanding that, on Friday, July 28, 2018 FinCen finally released the new SAR Form (2018).

This revision marks the first update to the SAR form since releasing the electronic-only version (v1.1) of the form a few years back.  These SAR changes appear to be substantially similar to the 2017 revisions that were made to the Currency Transaction Report (CTR) as most changes are minor in nature and will not be substantial for most financial institutions.  That said, three of the five sections of the original version of the electronic SAR are reported o have been modified, though, again, most changes are not substantial to financial institutions - with the exception on SARs filed for a cyber-event.  

As compliance professionals, we have an opportunity to impact future rules and regulations by providing comments to proposed rulemakings.  This opportunity is actually built into the rulemaking process, and I can tell you from reading many final rules over the years that comments are at least considered and often addressed in final rules.  The truth is that comments can make a difference and, right now, we all have an opportunity to provide feedback (comment) regarding how disparate impact is evaluated under the Fair Housing Act.

Revised Loan Estimate Expiration Date

In this Compliance Clip (video), Adam explains how the rule changes for completing the expiration date for a revised Loan Estimate could quite possibly be the biggest change to TRID 2.0. This is definitely something every creditor needs to review and ensure they understand the new rules so that they don't end up with violations during their next audit report.

Last week, the OCC and FDIC released their monthly list of CRA ratings from June of 2018.  The following summary provides a few noteworthy highlights from this months ratings. As we have advocated before, one of the best ways for a financial institution to understand their requirements under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) is to read the performance evaluations from other financial institutions.