Following up on a proposal to reform anti-redlining laws (which was published Thursday, with comments due March 9), the regulator of national banks will officially issue a “request for information” (RFI) on the issue Friday.
In a filing Thursday with the Federal Register (scheduled to be published Friday), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said it is seeking “bank-specific data and information to supplement currently available data and to inform potential revisions to modernize and strengthen” the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) regulatory framework.
In December, the OCC and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) proposed amending their regulations implementing CRA, which requires banks and some other financial institutions to lend money in the areas in which their institutions’ offices are located. The act was adopted in the 1970s following evidence of “redlining” of areas for loans by banks.
In filing its RFI, the OCC said the information it hopes to gather will assist the agency “in determining how the proposed rule might be revised to ensure that the final rule better achieves the statute’s purpose of encouraging banks to help serve their communities by making the framework more objective, transparent, consistent, and easy to understand.”
The RFI seeks bank information on such areas as: total amount of retail domestic deposits received, by county for each quarter-end; quarter-end balances, by county level, for each type of qualifying loan or community development (CD) investment held on the balance sheet; all retail loans that are qualifying activities under the regulations that are originated and sold within 90 days of origination; the total number and dollar volume, at the census tract level, of all new retail loans originated for each of the bank’s retail loan product lines.
The information request also asks banks to report on “burdens associated with collecting or reporting the data described” in the various sections.
The OCC said it would take the public input for 60 days.
Community Reinvestment Act Regulations; Request for Public Input