Views From the Chair
When U.S. Rep. French Hill was elected chairman of the House Financial Services Committee in December, he became the first former banker to lead the influential committee in more than 100 years — a fact that could reshape the regulatory landscape for finance nationwide.
Hill told Arkansas Business that his experience as a banker helps drive his policy decisions and gives him a better insight into how federal policy affects the financial services industry.
“When you are a bank CEO, you live under all those federal policy rules and those laws, and you see how they impact real people’s lives and the access to capital that people are seeking,” Hill said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C. “That practical, hands-on experience has been really helpful over the last decade in either critiquing policy to try to change it, or in formulating a new direction to certain topics.”
As chairman, Hill will oversee a committee with jurisdiction over the economy, the banking system, housing, insurance and securities and exchanges, among other sectors.
In November, Hill released a three-page document titled “Make Community Banking Great Again,” detailing 25 points he would prioritize in his chairmanship.
His reform agenda focuses on three main areas: regulatory fairness, promoting industry health and improving capital access. And though Hill hopes to accomplish as much as he can during his chairmanship, he does have a few priorities. The first of which is “reforming and bringing transparency” to how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — the federal agency that oversees consumer financial products and services — operates.
His plans include coordinating supervisory examinations between federal and state regulators to streamline the exam cycle and reduce the compliance burden on smaller institutions. He also wants the $10 billion threshold for financial institutions subject to CFPB supervision to be raised “to a substantially higher number” and indexed to inflation.
On the regulatory front, Hill wants to prohibit regulators from ordering banks to terminate accounts without material reason — a response to what he sees as politically motivated targeting of industries like firearms and digital assets.
His set of principles also outlines several reforms for bank mergers and acquisitions, as well as capital and funding access. He advocates “tailoring” regulations based on banks’ capital structure, risk profile and size, rather than applying one-size-fits-all rules, which are widely unpopular in community banking.
“Everything on that list is a priority,” Hill said. “We’ll be dividing it up into common elements and pursuing some of it by legislation and some of it by regulation.”
Source: Chloe McGehee, Arkansas Business
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