Rebeca Romero Rainey

The Home Loan banks have been a stable source of community bank funding for generations. An unnecessary regulatory crackdown now puts that reliability in question.

Congress needs to take immediate action to reform policies that foster this trend and ultimately subsidize banking consolidation on Main Street, writes Rebeca Romero Rainey, president and CEO of the Independent Community Bankers of America.

Big national retailers will capture all the financial benefits from proposed reductions in swipe fees, while consumers will be left with fewer benefits programs and less secure transactions.

Besides negating the benefits of a central bank digital currency, the Federal Reserve's real-time payments system will bring about numerous positive changes, including helping consumers who live paycheck to paycheck.

Community bankers already have decades of experience managing concentration risks and responding to extreme weather events and natural disasters in their communities.

Inconsistent rules for calculating bank capital threaten to cut off small banks from a key source of liquidity.

The agency’s proposed data collection and reporting requirements would disproportionately burden community banks, which lead the nation in small-business lending.

Heritage Southeast Bank in Georgia will become the latest community bank to stop paying federal taxes when it merges into VyStar Credit Union later this year. It's time for Congress to investigate this consolidation trend and its impact on taxpayers.

The assertion by former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn that smaller banks won't be viable in a high-tech world overlooks their success in partnering with fintechs, according to the Independent Community Bankers of America.

Wells Fargo remains the TBTF poster child and regulators continue to do too little to address the problem. And as always, small banks suffer collateral damage.