On February 8, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation published a proposal in the Federal Register that would simplify capital requirements for certain community banking organizations with less than $10 billion in total consolidated assets, consistent with Section 201 of the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act of 2018 (“EGRRCPA”).
Section 201 of EGRRCPA requires the agencies to promulgate a rule establishing a new “Community Bank Leverage Ratio” of 8%-10% for qualifying banking organizations. Under the proposal, depository institutions and depository institution holding companies that meet certain criteria (generally, those with limited amounts of off-balance sheet exposures, trading assets and liabilities, mortgage servicing assets, and temporary difference deferred tax assets) (“qualifying community banking organizations”) would be eligible to use a simple on-balance sheet leverage ratio as the measure of their capital adequacy. A qualifying community banking organization with a community bank leverage ratio (“CBLR”) of greater than 9% that “elects to use the CBLR framework” would not be subject to other risk-based and leverage capital requirements and would be considered to have met the well-capitalized ratio requirements for purposes of the agencies’ Prompt Corrective Action (“PCA”) framework. The proposal also “incorporates CBLR levels as proxies for the following PCA categories: adequately capitalized, undercapitalized and significantly undercapitalized,” under each of which a CBLR banking organization would “be subject to the same restrictions that currently apply to any other insured depository institution in the same PCA category.