OCC

The digital asset company, currently partnered with firms like Morgan Stanley and One Pay, is seeking its own national trust bank charter from the OCC.

While the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's recently published stablecoin rule bars stablecoin issuers from offering yield on holdings, there is enough wiggle room in the proposal — and unfinished business in Congress and the courts — for rewards to ultimately be accepted.

The proposed national trust charter company would be a wholly owned subsidiary of Morgan Stanley. The application was filed on Feb. 18.

A final rule published by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency Friday will formalize a 2021 interpretive guidance allowing national trust banks to perform non-fiduciary custody. The banking industry complained that the rule runs counter to the traditional scope of the charter. 

The agency's 400-page GENIUS Act proposal sets capital, reserve and operational rules to govern how stablecoin issuers may operate. 

The heads of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and National Credit Union Administration, as well as the Federal Reserve vice chair for supervision, will testify in the Senate Thursday morning in their first joint appearance in the upper chamber since being confirmed.

If the company gets final approval, it will be the newest crypto firm to receive a charter in recent months.

A group of Senate Democratic lawmakers warn proposed rule change would handcuff regulators from stopping risky bank behavior before it causes financial harm.

The Office of the Comptroller's interpretation of federal trust powers has opened the door for dozens of charter applications by nonbank crypto firms in recent months. Some experts say the agency's interpretation may push the ambiguous statute beyond its limits.

The Brazil-based fintech got conditional approval from the OCC to bring its digital banking services to U.S. customers.

Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said in a letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., that the OCC "intends to act consistent with this duty rather than your demand."

Efforts to exclude crypto firms from the provision of a number of different core financial services are doomed to fail. The only correct response is to provide the prudential regulation necessary to assure safe and sound operation.

Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould said Friday afternoon that regulators should scale back what he characterized as costly and ineffective bank-prepared resolution plans and shifting resolution responsibility onto bank regulators. 

A report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, released Thursday found that most sudden account closures were spurred by supervisory pressure rather than political or religious bias on the part of the banks, a finding that is at odds with the White House's framing of the issue.

Following President Trump's aggressive bank deregulation agenda, the FDIC and OCC, and occasionally the increasingly politicized Fed, are in a race to slash compliance requirements. Bankers should remember that the pendulum can always swing back.

The proposed rule codifies the ability for trust companies to conduct non-fiduciary activities, something banks say Congress never intended, but that OCC says has long been the case.

Conditional approval of a national bank charter used to be a virtual guarantee that an institution would open its doors. But the OCC's recent treatment of Erebor Bank suggests that banks with conditional approvals still have work to do.

Under a proposed rule, the agency would let most nationally chartered firms off the hook for heightened regulatory standards. The rule would raise the bar from $50 billion to $700 billion of assets and leave only eight firms subject to heightened regulation.

The megabank cleared a regulatory hurdle when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency freed it from a July 2024 amendment to a consent order. Two other orders, one from the OCC and the other from the Federal Reserve, remain in place.

Bank groups, crypto firms and regulators are divided over whether fiduciary digital-asset custody fits naturally within the national trust charter model — or whether, as critics argue, the agency is quietly reinventing the charter.