NCRC Statement on New Bank Merger Rules From DOJ, OCC and FDIC

After the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) each updated their bank merger review guidelines Tuesday, National Community Reinvestment Coalition President and CEO Jesse Van Tol released the following statement:

I welcome these moves to better protect the public from harmful mergers, as community advocates have long called for, by ensuring that the needs of everyday people are properly considered in these vital decisions. The regulators' determination is facing a stark test in the proposed Capital One-Discover merger, which would harm consumers and low-income communities if allowed to proceed.

The FDIC's moves significantly enhance post-merger accountability for banks' pre-merger commitments detailing benefits to the public - a big win for our communities which NCRC has worked towards for years. The DOJ Antitrust Division's commentary makes clear that the dialup-era standard of looking solely at depository overlap will no longer provide a rubber stamp. Instead, branch overlap will become one of many factors to be weighed, including where "economically underserved individuals" have "specialized demand appropriate for analysis as a distinct product market." This suggests that the needs of subprime credit card borrowers, for example, will be appropriately considered in both the division's competitive factors analysis for banking regulators and its decisionmaking about whether to intervene when it disputes those agencies' approval of a given deal.

Community organizations know that the Capital One deal would harm the people we serve. That was true under the old rules. It's even more obvious under these new ones.