FDIC seeks industry feedback on the future of remote exams

WASHINGTON — The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. is asking banks to comment on their experience with remote exams in the pandemic.

The FDIC's request for information, published in the Federal Register on Thursday, appears aimed at helping the agency develop longer-term best practices for off-site bank monitoring. The agency asked bankers to reflect on more than a year and half of largely remote bank examinations, with comments due Oct. 12.

The agency is ”seeking comment on what worked well in the off-site examination context to inform plans for future examinations, consistent with applicable law and the purpose of examinations,” it said in the RFI.

The onset of the pandemic in March 2020 pushed the prudential regulators to embrace bank examination that was done almost entirely in a virtual setting. But the agencies had already previously been doing much of their monitoring off-site. Many wondered whether the pandemic would speed up a conversion to fully remote exams.

While the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency pushed to get examiners back on-site last summer, the FDIC has generally appeared more comfortable with doing most examination activity off-site, using file- sharing tools like FDICconnect, for instance.

In the request for information, the FDIC asks bankers for feedback on specific examination activities that did and did not work well in a remote setting. The agency also asks about the best means of communication in a virtual examination setting, as well as what “new or emerging technologies would support additional off-site examination activities.”