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Bankers upset with a proposal to slash debit interchange fees are lobbying Congress and plotting survival strategies. Only TCF's Bill Cooper has been bold enough to take the Federal Reserve to court.
March 1 -
In a rare show of unity, the leading bank and credit union industry groups filed a joint friend-of-the-court brief to support TCF's lawsuit looking to block implementation of the Durbin amendment.
March 11 -
The legal volleying in TCF Financial's lawsuit to block the Durbin amendment continued Friday with company filing documents in federal court to counter regulators' opposition.
March 4 -
The Fed and OCC are asking a federal judge to dismiss TCF Financial's lawsuit, which seeks to block implementation of the Durbin amendment.
February 18 -
The head of TCF Financial Corp., which sued the Federal Reserve Board in October to challenge its debit card interchange fee caps, said growing opposition to the proposal may help his case.
January 20 -
William Cooper, TCF's chairman and chief executive, said Tuesday that its lawsuit against the Federal Reserve Board to block caps on debit card interchange fees is about more than preserving revenue, and that the industry could face worse restrictions if it stands idle.
October 12
TCF Financial Corp.'s William Cooper is rethinking his long-held belief that economies of scale do not matter in banking.
The overhead costs necessitated by new regulations clearly will be easier for large banks to absorb, and "unlike most things in banking," there will be nothing that smaller institutions can do from an execution or customer service standpoint to level the playing field, the chairman and chief executive of TCF said. He spoke Sunday at American Banker's annual Best Practices in Retail Financial Services Symposium.
Coping with rule changes has been top of mind these days for Cooper and for TCF, the Wayzata, Minn., company that is suing the Federal Reserve Board over its plan to limit debit interchange fees under the Durbin amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act. In his keynote address at the start of the two-day symposium in Miami, Cooper said that "there's a very good chance we'll win our lawsuit." He puts similar odds on Congress reviewing the Durbin amendment and either revising it or delaying its implementation.
In the meantime, the court challenge has not hurt TCF's relationship with examiners in the field, Cooper said.
"The good news for us is the Federal Reserve is not our primary regulator," he said. But either way, he added, the $18.5 billion-asset company has not "felt any regulatory impact one way or the other since we filed, and that's my honest opinion."
Cooper also said he suspects that the Durbin amendment has not won unanimous support from within the Fed.
"They're economists over there; they understand what a healthy credit market means to the country," said Cooper, who argued that the restriction on debit interchange fees could sap the banking industry of $10 billion of annual revenue.
A joint amicus brief supporting TCF's lawsuit was filed Friday by several banking trade groups, including the National Association of Federal Credit Unions, the American Bankers Association, the Financial Services Roundtable and the Independent Community Bankers of America.
"This is the most unified I've ever seen the banking industry in all my career," Cooper said.
