The American Fintech Council (AFC) has filed comment letters with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) backing proposed rule changes that would widen the circumstances under which banks and fintech companies can share confidential supervisory information (CSI). The letters respond to Notices of Proposed Rulemaking from both agencies and build on earlier AFC advocacy submitted jointly with the Independent Bank for Cooperatives Alliance to the OCC, FDIC and Federal Reserve in January 2026.
At its core, the AFC’s position is that the existing CSI framework creates friction at exactly the wrong moment in a bank-fintech relationship: before a formal partnership is established. Under current rules, institutions examining prospective partners, senior hires or acquisition targets face constraints that limit what supervisory context can be shared and with whom. The AFC argues that this effectively forces parties into a roundabout information-exchange process it describes as “playing a game of telephone,” increasing due diligence risk rather than reducing it.
What the AFC is asking for
The council is pressing both agencies on three related fronts. First, it wants the business-purpose disclosure authority that already permits some CSI sharing to be extended across the full life cycle of third-party relationships, including during initial pre-contractual due diligence. This would allow FDIC-examined service providers to disclose information about their own supervisory standing to prospective bank partners, enabling informed risk assessments before any contract is signed.
Second, in its OCC submission, the AFC specifically calls for CSI sharing to be permitted during merger and acquisition evaluations and during pre-engagement assessments of senior leadership candidates, covering a range of corporate events where supervisory history is directly material to decision-making.
Third, the AFC advocates for a structured route through which qualifying entities, including trade associations and independent research organisations, could receive institution-specific CSI solely to conduct aggregated analysis. The resulting aggregated findings would be publishable, supporting regulatory research and policy advocacy without exposing individual institution data.
On compliance safeguards, the AFC argues that protecting sensitive supervisory data does not require recreating the prior-approval burdens present in earlier frameworks. It recommends allowing confidentiality provisions to be embedded in existing commercial agreements rather than creating new standalone approval processes, and opposes rigid requirements such as domestic incorporation mandates, granular personnel access logs or transaction-level disclosures.
Phil Goldfeder, chief executive of the AFC, said a modern regulatory framework should allow institutions to exchange critical supervisory context at the earliest stages of collaboration, backed by rigorous compliance safeguards. Ian Moloney, the AFC’s chief policy officer, said modernising the framework would improve efficiency and efficacy in the examination process for all parties.
Regulatory context
The proposed OCC and FDIC rulemakings sit within a broader effort by US prudential regulators to update the legal infrastructure around bank-fintech partnerships. That effort has gathered pace following several high-profile partnership failures in the banking-as-a-service segment, where regulators found that banks had insufficient visibility into their fintech partners’ risk profiles before and during the relationship.
The CSI reform proposed here works the other side of that problem: not by adding oversight after a partnership is formed, but by improving the information available to both sides before they commit. For fintech companies that hold their own examination history from a prudential regulator, the ability to disclose that record to prospective bank partners could become a meaningful differentiator in a market where banks are increasingly cautious about onboarding new technology relationships without a full compliance picture. The comment period closes on the relevant regulatory deadlines; final rules, if adopted, would likely affect the majority of bank-fintech partnership frameworks operating under OCC and FDIC charters.
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