- Key insight: The House Financial Services Committee has a new legislative package that would address deposit insurance reform, including a bill with companion legislation in the Senate that waters down an earlier proposal hashed out in the Senate.
- What's at stake: Some bankers feared the previous proposal would be too costly for small banks.
- Forward look: The idea of deposit insurance reform picked up in 2023 following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and has
bipartisan support . The measure could see some momentum in the remainder of this Congress and into the next.
WASHINGTON — The House Financial Services Committee has a new package of bills aimed at reforming deposit insurance, including a companion bill to a revised bill offered by Sens. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., and Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., that represents a significant retreat from earlier versions of the legislation.
The package includes the new version of the Main Street Depositor Protection Act, which raises deposit insurance for noninterest bearing business accounts. An initial version of the legislation put forward by Hagerty and Alsobrooks set the deposit insurance limit for those accounts at
The new bill, which is sponsored by Rep. Bill Lucas, R-Okla., in the House, would let the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and National Credit Union Administration set the cap for such accounts, with a maximum deposit insurance limit of $5 million.
"The banks that serve Main Street must have the same chance to succeed as the banks that serve Wall Street," Hagerty said in a Wednesday statement. "This bipartisan, bicameral bill advances the Administration's priority of preserving the central role of regional and community banks in the financial system of the future. It's narrowly targeted to address a very specific concern that manifested itself during the Silicon Valley Bank collapse — a run on non-interest bearing transaction accounts typically used to make payrolls by small businesses that are very important customers for our local and regional banks."
While some banks liked the previous, larger version of that bill, a number of small banks worried that it would result in a
The legislative package also includes a bill from Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., that would reestablish
The committee has already passed legislation that would ease rules around brokered and custodial deposits — another effort to address issues around deposit insurance that arose in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank's failure.
The House Financial Services Committee also released a letter from the FDIC that outlines some uncertainty about the impact of changing the deposit insurance limit.
In the letter dated Dec. 31, 2025, the FDIC said that absent any other changes, an increase to the deposit insurance limit would change the deposit insurance ratio, which might mean the agency would have to raise assessment fees.
"In general, barring any other changes to FDIC assessments or the reserve ratio, an expansion of deposit insurance coverage would result in a lower reserve ratio," the agency said. "In response to a lower reserve ratio, the FDIC could retain the current assessment rate schedules, and allow the reserve ratio to grow more slowly over time (if the reserve ratio was still expected to grow despite the increase in insured deposits), or the FDIC could increase assessments to maintain a consistent growth rate in the reserve ratio."
It could also mean that the FDIC has to add a new line to banks' call reports to better understand the impacts, because banks do not currently report the data for noninterest bearing accounts separately.
"To delineate between account types, the Call Report would need to include separate line items for the insured and uninsured amounts of each of the eight account types," the agency said.
