The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency announced a return to risk-based supervision on Aug. 27, revising two supervisory manuals and publicly releasing its Matters Requiring Attention manual for the first time. The updated framework directs examiners to prioritize material financial risks and substantive legal violations rather than minor procedural deficiencies.
A joint final rule with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation defines unsafe or unsound practices around conduct that creates material financial risk. It also revises when supervisors may issue Matters Requiring Attention related to safety, soundness and legal compliance. The rule is intended to reduce MRAs based primarily on policies, paperwork or internal processes when those shortcomings do not create meaningful financial risk.
The OCC separately proposed a rule dividing legal violations into substantive and technical categories. A violation would be substantive when its nature, duration, frequency or severity could meaningfully affect a bank or its customers. Technical violations could still require correction, but they would not support an enforcement action, an MRA, or regulator-prescribed remediation methods. Comments are due 30 days after the proposal is published in the Federal Register.
Comptroller Jonathan Gould described the changes as a return to risk-based supervision. The revised enforcement manual establishes three principles: escalation, tailoring, and limiting corrective actions to measures needed to resolve a specific deficiency. Larger institutions face greater supervisory expectations because their operations and failures could present broader financial risks.
The changes apply to all OCC-supervised national banks, federal savings associations and federal branches, including federally supervised trust banks conducting digital-asset custody, stablecoin reserve management or blockchain settlement. The framework does not grant banks new crypto powers and does not remove requirements involving capital, liquidity, cybersecurity, sanctions, anti-money-laundering controls or consumer protection. Its relevance lies in how examiners classify deficiencies at crypto-focused institutions. In related coverage, Circle received final approval to establish a federally supervised digital-asset trust bank.
