Key Takeaways
The Fed opened a 60-day remark interval to codify the removing of “repute threat” from supervision.
The transfer follows the Fed’s June 2025 shift and parallel proposals from the FDIC and OCC.
Crypto corporations are watching intently, however regulators are positioning the proposal as a structural coverage shift.
The U.S. Federal Reserve has opened a 60-day public remark interval on a proposal to formally take away “repute threat” from its financial institution supervision framework.
The proposal would codify steps the Fed started taking in 2025 to strip “repute threat” out of its examination applications.
It might additionally formally refocus supervision on measurable threats tied on to security and soundness.
Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman mentioned the change is meant to handle considerations that the idea of repute threat has been utilized in methods which can be “obscure and inherently subjective.”
She added that the framework has additionally been linked to troubling cases of “debanking.”
“Repute threat” has traditionally referred to the possibility that damaging publicity or public notion may hurt a financial institution’s enterprise or monetary standing.
Not like credit score, liquidity, or market threat, nonetheless, reputational threat will be troublesome to quantify.
Bowman argued that the class has created inconsistency in supervision and might function as a catch-all that pulls consideration away from core monetary dangers.
She additionally warned that reputational considerations can present up in casual examiner communications, which banks might deal with as robust alerts even when they don’t seem to be formal findings.
The Fed’s proposal doesn’t recommend banks ought to ignore reputational concerns in their very own inner choices.
As an alternative, it goals to forestall examiners from utilizing “repute threat” as a supervisory software.
Examiners would want to border considerations by way of established monetary, operational, or compliance lenses.
The rulemaking builds on a June 2025 Fed announcement stating that reputational threat would not be a part of its examination applications and that the central financial institution had begun eradicating references to the time period from supervisory supplies.
The present proposal is designed to “memorialize” that change by way of the formal rulemaking course of. This may make the removing extra sturdy and clear.
The Federal Reserve’s transfer aligns with parallel actions by different U.S. financial institution regulators.
In October 2025, the Federal Deposit Insurance coverage Company (FDIC) and the Workplace of the Comptroller of the Forex (OCC) issued a joint proposal to equally prohibit the usage of repute threat in supervision.
