Overview
- The Fed announced a structural overhaul that moves supervisory authority away from the 12 regional Reserve Bank presidents into five geographic regions led by Washington‑accountable regional leaders while regional staff will still perform examinations.
- Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman said the change aims to fix a mismatch between decision authority and accountability that an independent review found left examiners slow to act during the 2023 failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature and First Republic.
- Bowman criticized the Fed’s heavy reliance on dozens of internal committees, saying committees created delays, obscured who was responsible, and discouraged examiners from taking timely, decisive actions.
- The Fed signaled it will revisit fixed-dollar asset thresholds and adopt a mechanism to update them every five years, and analysts have offered preliminary, unconfirmed estimates of how those thresholds might rise.
- Bowman also plans to expand the definition of a community bank, revisit rules such as Regulation O, and coordinate the new supervisory map with state bank supervisors, with formal rule proposals and an implementation timetable to follow.