Pub. 7 2018 Issue 6

August 2018 17 l e a d i n g a d v o c a t e f o r t h e b a n k i n g i n d u s t r y i n k a n s a s P rior to May 24, 2018, bankers may have had a hard time remembering what a big win in Congress looked like. It’s true that in the past year we saw important progress with the enactment of historic tax reform and the overturning of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s arbitration rule. But substantial regulatory reform had been elusive for a decade. That changed when Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) committed to crafting a bipartisan bill that recalibrates banking rules to allow banks to better serve their customers, clients and communities. Crapo’s distinctly bipartisan approach, plus roughly 19,000 banker visits to Washington and tens of thousands of emails and calls to lawmakers over the past eight years, changed everything. The result is S. 2155, the first positive, bipartisan regulatory reform bill to be signed into law in years. This occasion is worth noting not because S. 2155 contains everything banks want and need in order to fully serve their customers; it doesn’t. But the law suggests that the era of indiscriminately heaping more rules on banks has ended and a new era of better tailored regulation is settling in. It also recognizes that banks play an essential role in helping their customers, communities and the economy grow, and that policy should support that role, not make it harder. S. 2155: NOW FOR THE JUST-AS-HARD PART Rob Nichols, President and CEO American Bankers Association