The Office of Financial Research, created by the Dodd-Frank Act, has neither yet become the all-powerful entity its opponents feared, nor "the muscular, autonomous U.S. hub for financial regulatory data collection, standardization and storage that its backers hoped for," writes American Banker's Jeff Horwitz.
One of the main hopes of the office was that it could elegantly streamline data demands on banks and become a shared repository, eliminating duplicate request from different agencies.
The agency has been slow to meet such expectations and has fallen behind its own timeline for developing a legal entity identifier, a code to identify financial instituions. However "It may seem like things are going slowly, but I can assure you that by the standards of global regulation in the past, LEI is really moving at light speed," said an unnamed source.
Some of the delay can be attributed to obstacles to getting leadership in place "17 months elapsed before the Obama administration nominated a director, Richard Berner," writes Horwitz. "He's been denied formal confirmation since December due to Republican suspicions of the OFR's mandate."
The office has recently increased staffing and issued "request for information” on data management over the summer. Stay tuned.
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