Exams

The regulator is also evaluating relocating one regional office and scaling back from five regional offices to as few as three.

The Dodd-Frank Act is just the latest in a long string of policy out of Washington that harmed the greatest banking system devised by man.

Regulators have warned about the dangers of high commercial real estate concentrations despite bankers' assertions that they are managing risk better than they did before the financial crisis. Still, CRE concerns could influence M&A and loan diversification in 2017.

While other banking laws may be headed to the chopping block, the Community Reinvestment Act can address the needs of communities defined by their economic struggles.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is expected to downgrade Wells Fargo's Community Reinvestment Act rating in January to "needs to improve," from "outstanding," according to a story by Reuters, citing unnamed sources.

A Republican president and GOP-controlled Congress have the opportunity to disentangle the current regulatory web that leads to overlapping jurisdiction and duplicative rules.

You'd rather have a heart surgeon who has done a lot of bypasses than a novice, right? Perhaps the same thinking should apply to commercial lenders, according to several university researchers challenging the orthodoxy that making too many of the same kind of loans can only spell doom.

Regulatory costs may be warranted, but neither Congress nor the executive branch assessed the cost of the Dodd-Frank Act before its enactment.

While regulators discuss a potential federal fintech charter, another possible solution for firms trying to avoid multistate licensing already exists: the trust charter.

The piling on at Wells Fargo has reached an unprecedented level, even for a bank. Fifteen investigations are underway into Wells' phony account openings. Experts are quantifying the damage to Wells' reputation and what the bank can do going forward to repair it.