SDNY COURT/SOUTH BRONX, Aug 10 – Banks up
to $10 billion or even $30 billion stand to get exemptions
from the Community Reinvestment Act from the Office of the
Comptroller of the Currency and FDIC.
On August 10 one such bank announced a
proposed merger: HBT Financial, Inc., holding
company for Heartland Bank and Trust Company and
Tri-County Financial Group, parent of First State Bank in
Mendota, Illinois oday jointly announced the signing of a
definitive agreement pursuant to which Tri-County would
merge with and into HBT Financial - NOTE: HBT Financial
has assets of $6.7 billion, total loans of $4.8 billion,
and total deposits of $5.8 billion as of June 30, 2026 -
in the deregulation zone.
Consider that Heartland Bank and Trust
Company in Illinois in 2025 made 707 mortgage loans to
whites, with 178 denials, while making only TWENTY FOUR
loans to African Americans, with full 10 denials. This is
the type of disparate bank that the OCC and FDIC want to
deregulate - watch this site.
When predatory lender OppFi in April 2026
announced it would apply to captured regulators including
the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the FDIC
to buy a bank, BNC, in Arizona, Fair Finance Watch
immediately filed opposition. Since then Inner City Press
has submitted detained FOIA request, on these agencies
attacks on the Community Reinvestment Act and on related
topics, from artificial intelligence and data centers to
Live Nation and banks' violations.
Now as OppFi has submitted an August 7
purported response (now in the spirit of transparency on
Inner City Press' DocumentCloud here),
not to FFW and community groups but to state Attorneys
General, there are contradictions all around.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul says
he led eighteen state attorneys general this week in
telling the OCC and Federal Reserve exactly what FFW has
been documenting to them since April: OppFi's bid to
acquire BNC National Bank isn't really about banking, it's
about buying a national charter to escape state usury caps
entirely. The coalition's letter is substantively correct,
and worth saying so plainly — OppFi charges loans reaching
nearly 200% APR, currently laundered through a
Utah-chartered rent-a-bank partnership; a real charter of
its own, headquartered in Utah, would let it export those
rates nationwide under the National Bank Act, evading the
45 states plus DC that cap interest rates the way Illinois
does at 36%.
Fair Finance Watch has made the identical
argument in this same application's comment record, down
to the same Utah-relocation point. So, welcome in. But
it's worth asking, in the same breath, why some of these
eighteen offices have been so much harder to get a
straight answer from on requests touching this exact
subject matter — bank consumer complaints, Live Nation's
ticket-fee practices, and now, this year, AI oversight and
data centers.
Start with Illinois, leading this very
coalition. Inner City Press's FOIA request for AI-related
consumer complaints included "All records reflecting any
Illinois AG legal analysis of whether OppFi, CashNetUSA,
or other fintech lenders' use of AI in credit decisions or
marketing to Illinois consumers implicates the Illinois
Predatory Loan Prevention Act, 815 ILCS 123/15-1 et seq."
The request was denied by Raoul's office on
the grounds that it "does not docket complaints by topic."
An appeal to the state's Public Access Counselor remains
pending. On Live Nation, a separate Illinois PAC appeal
has likewise sat unresolved for months, with the state's
own arguments for withholding kept secret from the
requester. Texas, a major AI and bank merger state
and a repeat player in this outlet's FOIA record, told
Inner City Press outright, after a $648 cost demand and a
fee dispute still pending before the state's Cost Rules
Administrator: "I have no obligation to answer any of your
questions."
Massachusetts, after months of
installments, denied a fee waiver by stating only that it
"endeavors to treat all public records requests similarly"
— not the individualized public-interest analysis its own
statute requires — and separately invoked "Glomarization,"
a doctrine built for CIA sources and methods, to avoid
confirming or denying its role in a multistate OpenAI
subpoena whose existence is already public. Pennsylvania
applied the identical four-sentence "noncriminal
investigation" boilerplate across five separate categories
of records and reported zero AI-related consumer
complaints exist in a state with one of the country's
largest consumer protection bureaus. These are not
small-state outliers. Several are signatories to this
week's OppFi letter.
OppFi's response, and where it falls
short
OppFi, through the corporate law firm
Sidley Austin, filed a reply to the AGs (community groups
be damned, apparently) on August 7 — six sections plus an
FAQ appendix, citing Federal Reserve Board and New York
Fed research, a favorable California state-court ruling,
and customer testimonials. It is a substantive filing, and
several of its points deserve engagement rather than
dismissal: the fixed costs of small-dollar underwriting
genuinely do not scale down with loan size, and OppFi is
correct that annualized APR can overstate the cost of a
four-month loan relative to a lifetime charge-off rate.
OppFi also confirmed, usefully, that it does not intend to
offer cryptocurrency services through the resulting
bank. But the response has real gaps. OppFi cites
its TurnUp program as evidence it steers eligible
borrowers toward cheaper credit — yet its own figures show
TurnUp actually matched only 1.2% of eligible applicants
with a lower-rate loan in 2025. A program redirecting
roughly one in a hundred eligible applicants is thin
evidence that OppFi's triple-digit APR product is a last
resort rather than a default.
OppFi's argument against an "adverse
precedent" — that the agencies should apply approval
criteria "evenhandedly and without categorical exclusions
for particular business models" — does not refute the
coalition's slippery-slope concern; it is an argument for
extending the same charter-and-export path to any
comparable high-cost lender, which is exactly what the
coalition warned against. The academic research OppFi
relies on regarding Illinois's rate cap comes from
authors, including Thomas Miller, with a documented
history of consulting relationships with the small-dollar
lending industry — worth knowing before treating it as
disinterested economics.
And OppFi's own submission states that 40%
of its customers already hold accounts at a bank or credit
union — complicating its framing of itself as serving only
those banks have abandoned. Fair Finance Watch has
filed a reply pressing these points and renewing its
request for a public hearing, on the ground that OppFi's
response disputes the characterization — not merely the
legal conclusion — of nearly every point the coalition and
FFW raised: whether higher APR reflects predation, whether
refinancing benefits or burdens borrowers, whether
approval expands or contains risk to the population it's
meant to serve. These are genuinely disputed
characterizations of the same underlying facts, precisely
what a hearing exists to test.
The larger theme
There is a theme running through all of
this, worth naming plainly. The eighteen attorneys general
are right that OppFi should not be allowed to buy its way
around state law through a federal charter, and right that
the public has a stake in how that decision gets made. But
the public's stake in accountability does not stop at the
institutions these offices choose to scrutinize. It
extends to the offices themselves — to whether an Attorney
General who demands transparency from a lender will
provide the same transparency about the complaints,
investigations, and records the public has asked to see
from their own office. This year, on records concerning
Live Nation, AI oversight, data centers, and bank consumer
complaints, several of the same offices signing this
week's letter have not. This is not a small
inconsistency. In a year when the country marks 250 years
since a government first declared itself accountable to
the people it governs rather than the other way around, it
is worth insisting that accountability run in both
directions — that the offices asking federal regulators to
answer to the public hold themselves to the same standard
when the public asks something of them. Government by
consent depends on the ability to check power wherever it
sits, including in the very offices built to check it
elsewhere.
There is a concrete, near-term test
of whether this week's letter reflects that principle or
only a convenient application of it. The OCC and FDIC's
proposal to raise the Community Reinvestment Act's
threshold to $10 billion would exempt hundreds of bank
mergers from the very scrutiny that made OppFi's
application visible to regulators and advocates in the
first place.
If these eighteen offices believe, as they
say, that federal regulators must not let a lender evade
accountability through a technical maneuver, the same
principle should right now move them to oppose a rule that
lets hundreds of banks evade review through a technical
threshold. Fair Finance Watch has already filed FOIA
requests / comments against that rule. Whether this
coalition's letterhead appears on one, soon, will say
something real about which kind of accountability this
was. Watch this site.
