Agencies Issue Final Rule to Prioritize Material Financial Risks

Key dates

2026-08-27

OCC and FDIC issued the final rule and OCC published Bulletin 2026-40 describing its application to OCC-supervised banks.

Suggested considerations

• Compliance teams may wish to map existing and anticipated MRAs, enforcement commitments, supervisory recommendations, and examination findings against the new material-financial-risk and actual-violation criteria.
• Firms should consider separating board-level corrective-action items from nonbinding supervisory observations and documenting why each issue does or does not meet the MRA threshold.
• Risk and compliance functions may wish to update issue-taxonomy and escalation procedures to assess impacts on capital, asset quality, earnings, liquidity, sensitivity to market risk, and the Deposit Insurance Fund.
• Banks should consider retaining objective evidence and documented reasoning supporting materiality assessments, including institution-specific factors such as asset size, complexity, activities, and capital structure.
• Management and boards may wish to review outstanding policies, process, and documentation findings to determine whether they remain mandatory remediation matters, are better treated as supervisory observations, or independently constitute violations of banking or banking-related law.
• OCC-supervised banks should monitor the related examination guidance and assess whether planned lookbacks, independent-consultant requirements, or suspicious-activity review scopes are affected by the revised supervisory approach described in industry reporting.
• Firms should track Federal Register publication and calculate the 60-day effective date once publication occurs; the August 27, 2026 announcement date is not itself the effective date.

What changed

An unsafe or unsound practice is now defined as a practice, act, or failure to act that is contrary to generally accepted standards of prudent operation and either, if continued, is likely to materially harm the bank’s financial condition or present a material risk of loss to the Deposit Insurance Fund, or has already materially harmed the bank’s financial condition. Relevant financial-condition impacts include capital, asset quality, earnings, liquidity, and sensitivity to market risk; reputation concerns unrelated to financial condition are excluded. The definition also covers conduct likely to impair a bank’s ability to avoid receivership and create a material risk of loss to the Deposit Insurance Fund. An MRA may be issued only where the conduct meets the unsafe-or-unsound-practice st

Who is affected

• OCC-supervised national banks
• OCC-supervised federal savings associations
• OCC-supervised federal branches and agencies of foreign banks
• FDIC-supervised insured depository institutions

Related regulations

• 12 U.S.C. § 1818
• Federal Deposit Insurance Act
• Matters Requiring Attention supervisory framework