WASHINGTON, June 4 - The leaders of the nation’s principal bank regulators will appear before the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday to present a coordinated case for trimming regulatory burdens on banks, saying those changes will promote economic activity and innovation without creating undue risk for the financial system.
Officials from the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are expected to outline a broad review aimed at rethinking and softening many of the rules that were adopted in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. They plan to emphasize that the effort is designed to align oversight with actual risk and to make room for technological progress in finance.
In prepared testimony posted Wednesday, Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman said regulators are refining requirements so that supervision concentrates on the risks that matter most. "By tailoring requirements to actual risk, focusing supervision on what truly matters, and integrating innovation into the regulatory framework, the Federal Reserve is creating conditions for banks to thrive while maintaining the robust safeguards," she said.
Bowman and her counterparts have been revisiting more stringent standards imposed in recent years, arguing that heavy-handed oversight has restrained banks’ capacity to support the economy. Bowman also said the Fed has observed that examiners have flagged a number of bank deficiencies that were "procedural or documentation gaps, not actual financial risk."
Echoing that approach, FDIC Chairman Travis Hill said in his prepared remarks that the agency has for more than a year been reshaping supervision. "For over a year, we have been reforming supervision to focus on material financial risks rather than on process-oriented, check-the-box requirements," he said.
Regulators also signaled a desire to foster responsible innovation across the financial sector. They highlighted both banks and nonbanks as potential adopters of new technologies, including blockchain and artificial intelligence, and framed their role as one of enabling innovation.
"Our job is to facilitate, not stymie, responsible innovation," Comptroller Jonathan Gould said in prepared testimony. At the same time, they warned that emerging technologies bring new threats. Bowman noted that new AI models have "dramatically accelerated" the identification of vulnerabilities in the banking system, a development regulators say they must take into account as they adapt oversight.
These testimonies will update lawmakers on an initiative to recalibrate supervision and to integrate technological change into the regulatory framework while asserting that the changes will preserve system safeguards.