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Scores of foreign banks with very small U.S. operations still find themselves drafting "living wills" to provide U.S. regulators with a road map to their hypothetical failures, leading to calls for a lighter requirement.
May 20 -
Companies that submitted initial resolution plans last year to the Fed and FDIC under Dodd-Frank must detail in their second drafts how they would address impediments to a wind-down and follow the series of steps required for bankruptcy.
April 15 -
After spending nearly a year deliberating on an approach, the Federal Reserve Board on Friday released a proposal that will overhaul the way regulators will supervise foreign banks that operate in the United States, a significant shift from its longstanding case-by-case method.
December 14
WASHINGTON U.S. regulators on Tuesday gave certain firms, including large foreign institutions with a small footprint in the U.S., a guide on how to tailor their resolution plans that must be submitted by yearend.
The Dodd-Frank Act requires bank holding companies with more than $50 billion in assets and nonbank financial companies designated as systemically risky by the Financial Stability Oversight Council to provide resolution plans to the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
When regulators implemented the law in 2011 they tried to ease the burden on smaller firms by creating three tiered filing deadlines, as well as saying they would accept "tailored" resolution plans from simpler companies covered under the rule.
The first batch of firms considered to be the biggest and most complex, or those with more than $250 billion of assets, submitted drafts in July 2012. They were followed by a second group, which had more than $100 billion of assets but less than $250 billion, which filed in July. The third group, with assets of between $50 billion and $100 billion, are mostly foreign firms like Societe Generale, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial and Toronto-Dominion. They must submit so-called "mini" living wills by yearend.
The guide released on Tuesday was aimed at the third group of filers, including large global banks with small U.S. branches. Examples would be Caixa Geral de Depositos, a state-owned Portuguese bank with a roughly $300 million-asset branch in New York, and Monte dei Paschi di Siena, an Italian institution with a $650 million-asset branch in the U.S.
"The optional template is intended to facilitate the preparation of tailored resolution plans," according to a joint press release from the Fed and the FDIC.
Regulators had previously agreed to make adjustments to allow those firms with less than $100 billion in total nonbank assets to file a simpler plan.
Financial institutions had hoped the Fed and the FDIC would simplify the requirements. Observers had argued that such firms should not have to follow the same process as large banks, which costs significant time and resources.
According to the agencies, a tailored plan for smaller institutions should focus on the "nonbank operations of the firm and on the interconnections and interdependencies between nonbanking and banking operations."
