Overview
- The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued the final rule on Wednesday, October 21, 2026, and the regulation takes effect January 18, 2027.
- The rule requires one‑to‑one reserve backing in eligible assets, sets redemption and custody standards, establishes risk‑management and reporting obligations, and includes a $5 million capital floor for permitted issuers.
- The OCC removed a proposed rebuttable presumption on third‑party rewards, declined to give automatic grandfathering to existing exchange reward programs, and said it will assess indirect yield arrangements case by case.
- Key enforcement and compliance pieces remain unfinished because Treasury, FinCEN, OFAC, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC must still finalize AML, Bank Secrecy Act and sanctions rules that will sit alongside the OCC’s prudential standards.
- Applications and temporary waivers can only be filed after the Office of Management and Budget clears information collections, and industry groups and banks have already signaled sharply different views on how the OCC should police rewards and protect deposit funding.