WASHINGTON–The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) confirmed it has been working to gather information from both banks and fintech firms over the past year.
The objective is to publish a white paper in the near future to share the regulator’s perspective on where it believes it can bring value and where it projects there is room for innovation in the federal banking system.
The national bank regulator is taking steps into the emerging world of financial technology, weighing its first-ever charter request from a virtual-currency firm and preparing to release a report that will shed light on its views of the fintech sector.
“We want to explore things like partnerships between banks and fintechs, or banks themselves innovating. How do we have a workforce that’s well trained in this area to recognize both risks and opportunities?” Amy Friend, the OCCU’s chief counsel, told the Wall Street Journal.
The OCC is for the first time considering a request for a new bank charter from a virtual-currency firm that has presented “novel issues,” Friend told the Wall Street Journal, because one hasn’t been issued in the years since the financial crisis. She didn’t name the firm.
The Wall Street Journal noted that banks have only recently started to embrace partnerships with new fintech firms rather than seeing them as a competitive threat. “The industry and regulators are particularly watching partnerships that are building between large banks and blockchain, a tamper-proof public ledger that started primarily as the conduit behind the bitcoin digital currency,” The Wall Street Journal said.