Departing OCC Head Touts Digital Assets Efforts

“Since my arrival, I demonstrated that ‘acting’ does not mean ‘inactive’ and I am immensely proud of all the OCC has accomplished in a short amount of time to advance the safety, soundness and fairness of the federal banking system,” Hood said Monday (July 14), days after the U.S. named its first full-time Comptroller of the Currency in five years.

He made these comments in a news release touting the agency’s efforts during his five-month tenure, including work by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to expand banking activities with digital assets.

These include:

• Interpretive Letter 1183, which confirmed that crypto-asset custody, certain stablecoin activities, “and participation in independent node verification networks such as distributed ledger are permissible for national banks and federal savings associations.”
• Interpretive Letter 1184, issued two months later, allowed national banks and federal savings associations to buy and sell assets held in custody at the customer’s direction “and are permitted to outsource to third parties bank-permissible crypto-asset activities, including custody and execution services.”

Among the other initiatives Hood mentioned are:

• Promoting bank/FinTech partnership by announcing in March the conditional approval of a “financial technology business model for a national bank.”
• Easing banking regulations with an interim rule on banking mergers that restored a  “streamlined application and expedited review” to the OCC’s procedures for looking into bank merger applications.
• Efforts to strengthen the banking system, which included last month’s call for comment by consumers, business and financial institutions in ways to prevent payments fraud, with a special focus on check fraud.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last week about Jonathan Gould, Hood’s successor, whose appointment to head the OCC had just been confirmed.

“His experience as chief legal officer at blockchain firm Bifury and a previous tenure at the [OCC] during the previous Trump administration as senior deputy comptroller and chief counsel signal a relaxation of digital asset regulations, particularly for banks, and an easier path for some of nonbanks and digital upstarts to obtain banking charters,” that report said.

Testifying before the Senate Banking Committee in March, Gould argued that in the years since the 2008 financial crisis, banking regulators have “at times tried to eliminate rather than manage risk, frustrating the ability of banks to fulfill their function.”