Pub. 9 2014-2015 Issue 2

www.nebankers.org 8 Extraordinary Service for Extraordinary Members. O NE OF THE THINGS I OFTEN HEAR when I have the opportunity to speak with you and your colleagues at your state bank- ers association’s annual convention is how new regulatory requirements are making it harder to lend and serve your communities. We know your regulatory burden is excessive—the Dodd-Frank Act has delivered 7,000 pages of new rules and guidance so far, and there’s more to come. The cumulative impact across the banking industry and across our economy is staggering. Banks’ compliance obligations also create unwieldy juxtapositions. When it comes to mortgage lending and ser- vicing rules, for example, some banks are finding they must choose between serving customers and protecting them- selves legally. ABA believes the solution to this seemingly intractable problem lies in what we call “tailored regulation”— government policies that recognize the diversity of the banking industry and the communities you serve. Rules that correspond to a bank’s charter, business model, geography, and risk profile help avoid the negative economic conse- Washington Update A Rifle-Shot Approach to Reg Relief Frank Keating , President & CEO, American Bankers Association quences of unsuitable, inefficient bank regulation. While we have seen some successes with this approach—such as with im- provements made to the BASEL III and Volcker Rule regulations—we have a ways to go in undoing the damage done by Dodd-Frank. A special ABA/state bankers associations task force, how- ever, has crafted an effective strategy to win you more relief. Assembled earlier this year, the ABA/ Alliance Regulatory Relief Task Force examined dozens of significant regula- tory burdens and identified a few that it believed could be addressed in a mean- ingful way through legislation this year. The focus on just a few was deliberate. It’s hard enough to get must-pass legis- lation, like spending authorization bills, through Congress. An omnibus relief bill for banks would have trouble getting to the runway, let alone getting liftoff. But targeted bills in which the clear beneficiary is bank customers could and should stand a decent chance for enactment. Indeed, two bills that make the changes advocated by the task force cleared the House Financial Services Committee in May. Now we are urging bankers to generate support for them in the full House. The bills are: • H.R. 2673, the Portfolio Lending andMortgage Access Act, which would deem loans held in portfo- lio as Qualified Mortgages; and, • H.R. 4521, the Community In- stitution Mortgage Relief Act, which would exempt lenders with less than $10 billion in assets from the Dodd-Frank Act’s escrow requirements and servicers handling fewer than 20,000 loans from the servic- ing rule. We also are throwing our weight behind a third bill, H.R. 4466, which embodies the spirit of reg relief by requiring regulators to review and reconcile conflicting regulations before finalizing new ones.