On February 11, 2015, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) issued an “updated” installment to the Comptroller’s Handbook in a new booklet entitled “Deposit-Related Consumer Credit.” In doing so, the OCC stole a page from the playbook used by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in its notice of proposed rulemaking on prepaid products (“Prepaid Proposal”).
Similar to the CFPB’s approach of treating overdraft services on prepaid cards as “credit” for purposes of Regulation Z—a move that, if adopted, could regulate prepaid overdraft services out of existence—it appears that the OCC now expects financial institutions it supervises to obtain customer opt in for overdraft services, perform ability-to-repay analysis for those services and establish overdraft fees that are “reasonably correlated to the actual cost” of the service. At least the CFPB’s Prepaid Proposal was issued pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act, with an opportunity for comment.
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