The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) has launched the Plan for Prosperity, its policy platform for the 113th Congress that is designed to ‘ease excessive, redundant and costly regulations and help community banks dedicate more of their resources to promoting economic growth.’
Among its provisions, the Plan for Prosperity would seek the following goals:
- Exempt community banks from certain mortgage reforms to support the housing recovery;
- Reduce annual privacy notice redundancies to cut paperwork;
- Ease municipal advisor registration burdens to help serve local governments;
- Reform the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to ensure more balanced regulation; and
- Improve accountability in bank exams with a workable appeals process;
‘By relieving the nation's community banks and the communities they serve from crippling regulatory burdens, Congress would be making a historic step in rebuilding America's economy one community at time,’ says ICBA President and CEO Camden R. Fine. ‘ICBA's Plan for Prosperity offers targeted and common-sense regulatory relief that will allow community banks to do what they do best – help their communities thrive. Reducing unnecessary and overly burdensome regulations is a smart and cost-free way to boost economic activity and job growth across the nation.’