Popular crypto key focus, US banks must ‘keep upʼ, says OCC

Expanding the responsible banking activities involving digital assets is a key focus for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Some 50 million Americans now hold cryptocurrency and US banks “must keep up with this transformation”, Rodney Hood, acting Comptroller of the Currency, said last week.  

“I want to enable that activity to occur within the federal banking system according to a safe and sound framework,” said Hood who was one of the keynote speakers at the Building Societies Association’s (BSA) 250^th anniversary conference in Birmingham, UK. 

The OCC recently reaffirmed that a range of cryptocurrency activities are permissible by the institutions it supervises.  

Expectations clarified  

Hood spoke the day after the OCC published a letter clarifying its expectations of the services that the banks it regulated should provide around cryptocurrencies. These include facilitating customersʼ exchange between fiat and cryptocurrencies, transaction settlement, and trade execution either directly or by engaging a sub-custodian. 

“We expect banks to have the same strong risk management controls in place to support novel bank activities as they do for traditional ones,” said Hood, who was appointed on February 10. 

Banks willing to take on cryptos 

The OCC regulates more than 1,000 national banks and federal savings associations, as well as supervising and licensing the federal branches and agencies of foreign banks. These banks have been reluctant to take on crypto clients but this is starting to change. 

“One of the things that we’ve seen an adjustment in over the last few months is that banks that maybe previously didnʼt have the risk appetite to support crypto businesses are more willing to have conversations now,” said Marca Wosoba, chief operating officer at ZBD, a New Jersey company enabling real-time, bitcoin nano transactions in play-to-earn games. 

For companies like ZBD that want to operate in the US, having a local account at a traditional bank will permit it to roll out its payment product across the country. “This has been a positive development in terms of the shift in sentiment,” Wosoba told Compliance Corylated. 

Fed, FDIC change tack  

In addition to the OCC changes, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) have modified their approach to crypto activities.  

On March 28, the FDIC rescinded the requirement for banks to inform it before engaging in crypto-related activities. Under the new guidance, FDIC-supervised institutions can engage in permissible crypto-related activities without prior approval, provided they manage associated risks effectively.   

Meanwhile, the FRB has withdrawn two supervisory letters covering crypto.  One dating from 2022 asked for advanced notice of planned crypto activities; the FRB will instead monitor banks’ crypto activities through its usual supervisory activities. The other, from 2023, required banks to obtain a formal “non-objection letter” before engaging in stablecoin activities.  

On April 24, 2025, the agencies withdrew joint statements issued on January 3, 2023, and February 23, 2023, which addressed crypto-asset risks and liquidity risks to banking organisations resulting from crypto-asset market vulnerabilities.