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Community banks should do some serious soul searching about their mortgage operations as they approach the CFPB's January implementation deadline.
September 18 -
Mutual thrift defections from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency should decline now that once-nervous bankers have gotten a chance to get familiar with the regulator.
July 1 -
With the ever-increasing regulation burden, community banks with small staffs struggle to keep up with new and changing rules. Some have deployed software to streamline their compliance to-do lists. Bank of the Sierra in Porterville, Calif., is one of them.
May 17
Banks had to devote more money to compliance in the third quarter after regulators increased the rate of new enforcement actions.
Regulators issued 202 enforcement actions in the third quarter, compared to 154 a quarter earlier, according to a report published Wednesday by Continuity Control, a firm that makes banking-compliance software. It was the most new regulatory actions since the fourth quarter of last year.
If the current rate of enforcement-action issuance continues, 12% of all banks will be under regulatory orders by Sept. 30, 2014, Continuity Control said.
"Community banks are facing increased regulatory demands, while at the same time, regulators are demonstrating a new focus on beefing up enforcement, creating one of toughest regulatory environments we've seen in 25 years," Pam Perdue, Continuity Control's chief compliance strategist, said in a press release.
In addition, 65 regulatory changes went into effect in the third quarter, up from 55 a quarter earlier. The page count of new rules rose 62%, to about 3,900.
The average cost of compliance for each institution rose to $43,493, up from $39,772 a quarter earlier and about $26,000 a year earlier. The average number of full-time employees a bank needs to handle compliance rose slightly, to 2.34, while the average number of hours an institution needed to spend on compliance in the quarter fell 5%, to 790.
Continuity Control's quarterly Banking Compliance Index tracks banks' regulatory burdens using a multi-variable formula that takes into account the number of new rules, their page count and the number and complexity of enforcement actions issued, among other factors.
