WASHINGTON—Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has released an expanded fact sheet detailing additional policies that deliver regulatory relief for CUs and community banks.
New policies impacting CUs include curtailing regulatory “creep” by ensuring credit unions and smaller financial institutions are “only subject to rules that make sense for their size and mission.”
“While Wall Street’s reckless risk-taking created a global financial crisis, community banks and credit unions were working to help ordinary Americans and Main Street get ahead,” she said. “Even as the Dodd-Frank Act and our regulators have taken important steps to tailor rules in ways that minimize undue impacts on smaller financial institutions, many community banks and credit unions still struggle with unnecessary regulatory complexity – hindering their ability to fuel small business growth and job creation without enhancing consumer protections or improving the safety of the financial system.”
Clinton’s regulatory relief efforts for credit unions and other community institutions also include:
- Avoiding duplicative and unnecessary examinations for community banks and credit unions, and making exam “schedules more flexible for healthy credit unions so they don’t face unneeded supervision.”
- Streamlining safe mortgage lending by community banks and credit unions. Clinton supports a Senate proposal to expand the safe harbor for “qualified mortgage” liability protection to include all mortgages made by community banks and credit unions with less than $10 billion in assets when certain criteria are met.
- Simplifying capital requirements for community banks, by having regulators explore ways to further simplify capital requirements for banks with less than $10 billion in assets.
- Streamlining reporting requirements for banks with less than $1 billion in assets.
- Giving small financial institutions a greater voice by ensuring that the Federal Reserve Board includes a member with expertise in issues facing smaller financial institutions. Clinton also plans to have senior officials in the Treasury Department work closely with community banks and credit unions to “ensure that economic policy and financial regulations are helping them to grow and succeed.”
- Ensuring tough and fair enforcement, regardless of bank size.
NAFCU said its federal advocacy team has met with both Clinton’s and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaigns. NAFCU President and CEO Dan Berger on Thursday sent a letter to Clinton thanking her for her focus on credit unions’ regulatory relief and conveying that the association stands ready to work with her on all these issues she’s outlined should she be elected.
While CUNA said it does not endorse presidential candidates, the trade association noted that it does appreciate the Clinton campaign for recognizing credit unions’ important role in the financial services industry and the effects of regulatory burden.