The OCC expects to propose the benchmarking framework it will use to assess Community Reinvestment Act performance within the next four to six weeks, Acting Comptroller of the Currency Brian Brooks said in keynote remarks at ABA’s Risk and Compliance Virtual Conference today. When the OCC issued its final CRA rule in May, it said it would propose objective thresholds and benchmarks in the future.
The goal of performance assessments under the OCC’s new CRA rules is to “move away from a world where banks’ performance scores are relativistic.” Instead, Brooks said, the agency aims to set objective benchmarks against which individual banks may be assessed.
Brooks added that the industry will have a “long runway” to adjust to the new benchmarks. ““We will not be looking at CRA performance [under the new benchmarks] for large banks until 2023 and for smaller banks until 2024,” he said.
