Greg Baer, President of The Clearing House Association (TCH), today testified before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit.  The hearing focused on the implementation of FinCEN’s customer due diligence rule.

Greg Baer, President of The Clearing House Association (TCH), today testified before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit.  The hearing focused on the implementation of FinCEN’s customer due diligence rule.

The NACHA Excellence in Payments Award honors superior leadership and accomplishment in the development, implementation or advancement of domestic or international electronic payments. Steve is recognized for his 30+ years in payments leadership, most recently overseeing nearly all aspects of RTP®. The attributes that set Steve apart are his inclusive approach, positive outlook and infectious enthusiasm for what’s next.

Today, Greg Baer, President of The Clearing House Association, spoke to the Exchequer Club of Washington, D.C. where he discussed the current framework for bank supervision.

Today, The Clearing House (TCH) announced it has formed an RTP® Advisory Committee from a diverse set of financial institution stakeholders to obtain input on the operation of its new real-time payments system. The committee is comprised of senior executives from credit unions, community and mid-size banks, and trade associations. The committee is charged with providing perspectives that will help RTP continue to be responsive to all financial institutions and drive adoption of RTP in an effort to achieve the goal of ubiquity by 2020.

In a comment letter, filed with the Federal Reserve, The Clearing House highlights the need for significantly greater public transparency into key aspects of the Federal Reserve’s stress testing and capital planning framework and offers three recommendations to improve transparency that aim to ensure stress testing continues to serve its prudential purposes but better promotes economic growth, vibrant capital markets, and the global competitiveness of the U.S. banking system.

The Clearing House (TCH) launched RTP®, its real-time payments system, the first new core payments infrastructure in the U.S. in more than 40 years.  The new RTP system was designed and built through the collaborative effort of TCH’s 25 owner banks and meets the objectives of the Federal Reserve Faster Payments Task Force. RTP is open to all U.S depository institutions with a goal of reaching ubiquity by 2020.

Today, The Clearing House (TCH) and Mastercard announced they are partnering to enable TCH to provision and manage Mastercard-branded tokens on behalf of banks. The partnership with Mastercard establishes TCH as one of the first Mastercard-certified third-party Token Service Providers to enter the US market, and enables TCH to support current and future token capabilities ranging from mobile payments to remote purchases and Internet-of-things (IoT) transactions.

In a comment letter filed on September 21 with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, The Clearing House (TCH) made recommendations regarding how to more effectively implement the Volcker Rule to better promote lending, banking services, and vibrant capital markets while still ensuring it meets its objective of reducing risk and enhancing bank safety and soundness by restricting excessive risk-taking activities by banks and their affiliates.

Task Force's final report offers a roadmap for achieving competitive, safe, ubiquitous, and faster payments.

In his testimony before the House Financial Services Subcommittee Greg Baer, President of The Clearing House Association (TCH), detailed recommendations The Clearing House recently proposed in a report entitled A New Paradigm: Redesigning the U.S. AML/CFT Framework to Protect National Security and Aid Law Enforcement. 

In the comment letter to the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, The Clearing House (TCH) expresses serious concerns about certain inappropriate proposed changes, which would disproportionately and adversely affect four U.S. banks. 

 The Clearing House Payments Company L.L.C. (“The Clearing House”) and the Electronic Clearing House Organization (“ECCHO”) today announced that they have agreed to pursue a strategic opportunity that would transfer the business and operations of ECCHO to The Clearing House. 

Greg Baer, President of The Clearing House Association (TCH), today testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.   In his testimony, Mr. Baer focused on reforms that can directly and immediately enhance economic growth.  

The Clearing House released a report entitled A New Paradigm: Redesigning the U.S. AML/CFT Framework to Protect National Security and Aid Law Enforcement.  The paper analyzes the current effectiveness of the AML/CFT regime, identifies fundamental problems with that regime, and proposes a series of reforms to remedy them.

The Clearing House research note finds that the Federal Reserve’s CCAR stress test is imposing dramatically higher capital requirements on certain asset classes – most notably, small business loans and residential mortgages – than Basel standardized models and banks’ internal models that are approved by the Federal Reserve.

TLAC requirement is a “final piece in the regulatory puzzle” needed to end risk of TBTF.

The Clearing House, along with the Securities Industry and Financial Markets, Financial Services Roundtable, American Bankers Association, Institute of International Bankers and  CRE Finance Council submitted a comment letter to bank regulators Friday on the proposed Net Stable Funding Ratio (“NSFR”) rule.  In the letter, the Associations express continued support for the maintenance of stable funding and liquidity profiles by banks, but urge that the NSFR not be implemented in the United States without an analytically sound rationale that considers its marginal benefits and economic costs.

The Clearing House today issued a white paper, The Custody Services of Banks, which describes the role of bank-chartered custodians.  The paper discusses the services provided by bank-chartered custodians, their relationships with financial market utilities (FMUs), and describes the different risks associated with custody services in comparison to those associated with other banking activities.

Jeremy Newell, General Counsel of The Clearing House Association (TCH), testified today before the House Financial Services Committee at a hearing focused on the tradeoffs in using a leverage ratio to assess capital adequacy as proposed in the discussion draft of the Financial CHOICE Act recently released by Chairman Hensarling.

In a new research note, The Net Stable Funding Ratio: Neither Necessary nor Harmless, The Clearing House finds the Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) has no clear, defining objective and its benefits are in doubt while its economic costs may be substantial.

Greg Baer, President of The Clearing House Association (TCH), today testified before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs at a hearing focused on bank capital and liquidity regulation.

In the letter, to the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the associations affirmed their support for the proposed withdrawal of the Advanced Measurement Approach framework.  The letter also offered recommendations on changes that would make the proposed standardized measurement approach more risk-sensitive and reflective of the current banking operational risk environment.

The letter to the Federal Reserve on its reproposal of the single-counterparty credit limit (SCCL) requirement of the Dodd-Frank Act, notes substantial improvements included in the March 2016 reproposal, and details some problematic aspects that still remain that could make the rule needlessly difficult to implement and in some instances unworkable.