OCC’s Gould: Bank regulation should not distract banks from business challenges

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency will seek to ease the regulatory and supervisory burden on banks so their management can focus on their institutions’ business challenges, Comptroller Jonathan Gould said today.

Gould outlined his vision for the agency during a Q&A at a Washington, D.C., conference hosted by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. The comptroller said banking regulators are “overdue” to take a hard look at the regulations put in place since the 2008 financial crisis to determine what is working and what isn’t.

“Banks are in the business of taking and managing risks. That’s their job. They serve a social function,” Gould said. “But we have set a risk tolerance through supervision and regulation over the last 17 years that, I think, is far too low and is actually counterproductively low. It’s impeding banks from taking socially useful risks.”

Bank management should be able to concentrate on things such as competition and meeting technology demands, Gould said. Instead, recent regulation and supervision led banks to focus on “trivialities or immaterial things.”

“If I can kind of dial that back a little bit, they can focus more on the things that matter most, medium and long term, to their survival, and ensure they continue to play the role they need to play in our society and the communities in which they operate,” he said.