OCC and FDIC roll out joint rule on unsafe practices and MRAs
The two primary federal bank supervisors have begun implementing a joint final rule that defines unsafe or unsound practices and matters requiring attention, reshaping how supervisory findings are issued and tracked.
What happened: as part of the roll-out of a joint final rule defining unsafe or unsound practices and matters requiring attention, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation have each released implementing policy changes. The available reporting does not set out the rule's full text, compliance dates, or which provisions differ between the two agencies, so the precise scope should be confirmed against the agencies' own releases and any effective dates they specify.
Why sophisticated counsel should care: matters requiring attention are the supervisory counterpart to formal enforcement, and the definitions attached to both unsafe or unsound practices and MRAs influence what examiners can criticize, what must be remediated, and how quickly. For bank holding companies, national banks, thrifts and their boards, those definitions bear on remediation planning, attestation and resolution-timeliness discussions, and the interface between supervisory criticism and any later enforcement theory. Clients may want to test whether existing policies, risk-management frameworks and board reporting match the finalized terminology.
What to watch next: each agency's separately issued policy statements, the rule's effective and compliance dates, how examiners apply the definitions in the next cycle, and any tailoring between OCC and FDIC expectations. Details absent from the available source are unverified.