American Banker, March 19, 2020: Will OCC plan silence some critics of bank M&A?
Community reinvestment advocates are raising alarm about potential restrictions on their ability to formally protest bank mergers following a recent proposal by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
Earlier this month, the OCC unveiled a sprawling, technical document proposing an array of steps to “eliminate unnecessary requirements” in bank licensing and other forms of business combinations.
Buried within the proposal are more specific standards for when the agency should consider “adverse comments” from groups that want to protest a merger on the grounds that one of the parties in a deal has not done enough lending under the Community Reinvestment Act.
Advocates say asking for fact-based feedback has merit, but being too restrictive could lead to huge swaths of public feedback from community groups being ignored.
“When you narrow the framework for acceptable comments into terms of facts or analysis, or data points in retrospective, you run the risk of ignoring broader concerns,” Van Tol said. “A broader concern might not be backed up by a lot of hard data — you might just think something is bad — but where that line is is pretty subjective.”
