The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has rewritten how it decides when to come down hard on a bank, and how fast. On August 27, the OCC released revised versions of its two core enforcement manuals, one governing formal enforcement actions and one governing “matters requiring attention,” the informal findings examiners issue during routine supervision. Both are built around the same idea: stop treating every gap the same way, and start weighting responses to the size of the risk and the size of the bank.
Comptroller Jonathan V. Gould framed the change as a correction, not a loosening, saying that “a supervisory culture based on check-the-box compliance can distract examiners and bank executives from material financial risks.” The new framework instructs examiners to prioritize material financial risks over “concerns related to policies, process, documentation,” and explicitly builds in a double standard by bank size: “The OCC may escalate to an enforcement action against a large or complex bank based on practices that would not trigger a similar response against a community bank.” A companion rule, issued jointly with the FDIC, sets a uniform definition of “unsafe or unsound practice” for the first time.
The timing lands right after a different OCC shift: the agency spent the first half of August clearing a backlog of new bank charter applications, ending a multi-year charter drought, even as some fintech applicants are still getting turned away. Read together, the two moves describe the same regulatory posture from opposite ends. The OCC is making it easier to become a chartered bank while simultaneously building a steeper, faster enforcement ladder that specifically targets the largest, most complex institutions once they are inside the system. For a fintech weighing a national bank charter, the message is that getting chartered is no longer the hard part; staying ahead of risk-based supervision at scale is.
