Incoming ABA President and CEO Rob Nichols appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” this morning to discuss the importance of regulatory relief for banks and industry unity in confronting challenges to bankers.
“Our banking sector is the envy of the world, in part because it has community banks, mid-sized banks and large and regional banks and they each play a really important role in our financial ecosystem,” Nichols said during the in-studio discussion in New York City. “We want to improve the policy circumstances for all of these banks.” He emphasized that ABA is currently pursuing fixes to the Dodd-Frank Act to ensure regulations are right-sized for all banks. “There’s regulatory reform to get legislation tailored — to get it right — that we would like to achieve,” he said. “I’ve talked to CEOs of banks of all sizes, and there’s definitely an understanding that some of the smaller banks have been caught up in the policy response in a way that they were not intended to.”
Nichols also addressed big challenges to the banking industry, including the convergence of banking and technology and the need for a level playing field for bank and nonbank providers of financial products and services, and the growing importance of millennials — who bank in different ways — as a customer base.
