SDNY COURTHOUSE, March 16 –
The FDIC and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
have jointly proposed raising the Community Reinvestment
Act's asset threshold for full examination from $1.6
billion to $10 billion — a change that would exempt
hundreds of banks from the lending, investment, and
service tests currently applied to institutions of their
size.
Inner City Press has filed Freedom of
Information requests with both agencies seeking records of
who they consulted before proposing the change, and is
separately reviewing the CRA Performance Evaluations of
banks that would fall into the newly exempted range, to
document what kind of institutional weakness full
examination currently catches — and would stop catching if
the rule takes effect.
Emigrant Bank, headquartered in New York,
New York, holds approximately $5.85 billion in assets —
comfortably above today's $1.6 billion Community
Reinvestment Act threshold, meaning it is subject to full
CRA examination now. Under the $10 billion threshold the
OCC and FDIC have jointly proposed, Emigrant would fall
well inside the newly exempted range, along with hundreds
of other banks of comparable size. Emigrant's most recent
and already outdated CRA Performance Evaluation, conducted
by the FDIC and dated October 3, 2022, rated the
bank Low Satisfactory on the Lending Test:
"The bank made a very small percentage of loans in its
assessment area." "The distribution of borrowers reflects,
given the demographics of the assessment area, a poor
penetration among retail customers of different income
levels and business customers of different sizes."
. That is precisely the kind of finding a
full CRA exam is built to surface, and precisely the kind
of finding a bank of Emigrant's size would no longer be
guaranteed to receive if the pending threshold rule takes
effect.
Fair Finance Watch has analyzed Emigrant
Bank's 2025 mortgage lending in New York State, using Home
Mortgage Disclosure Act Data, and it is disparate. In NYS
in 2025 Emigrant Bank made 34 mortgage loans to whites and
only FOUR to African Americans. This HMDA data too show
what the agencies' proposed deregulation would look away
from.
Fair Finance Watch has asked both agencies
to weigh precisely this kind of record before finalizing
the rule. Watch this site.
