Bank Regulators Ease Restrictions to Spur Financial Innovation

Following the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, long pursued an almost “zero-failure” regulatory approach, leaving new bank charters effectively frozen for nearly 20 years. Policy is now shifting toward allowing manageable failures, with an emphasis on using orderly exit mechanisms to contain risk and bring fintech and digital-asset companies into the regulated financial system.

As of April 10, 2026, a key milestone in that shift was the OCC’s conditional approval on December 12, 2025, of five national trust bank charters involving companies including Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos. More than 1,000 institutions supervised by the OCC collectively hold over $17 trillion in assets and administer more than $85 trillion.