The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) denied a national trust bank charter on July 21 and for bunq, another full-service national bank charter on August 4. In a bulletin issued June 17, the OCC said it “plans to make all denial decisions public” so that industry can see “how the OCC has applied the decision criteria.” The approvals, issued in consecutive months, explain the agency’s legal authority thoroughly and its supervisory judgment almost not at all. The two rejections are the only calibrated accounts of what the OCC weighs when a fintech asks to become a bank.
Neither letter announces a new standard. The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council’s anti-money laundering manual sets out what a compliance program must contain; the Comptroller’s Licensing Manual booklet on charters and 12 CFR 5.20(f) set out what the agency evaluates when it charters a bank. What the letters supply is the weighting — how much a live consent order costs an applicant, and whether a record built under one regime transfers to another.
The asymmetry itself is longstanding. Regulation requires the OCC to notify a denied filer in writing of the reasons for denial; approvals carry no reciprocal duty. Mercury’s April letter grants preliminary conditional approval, “upon determining that your proposal meets certain regulatory and policy requirements,” yet never enumerates them. What changed in June is the commitment: the OCC will now publish every denial, but it still owes no explanation for a single approval.
What a Record Costs
In July of last year, a licensed money transmitter in 48 states entered into a coordinated consent order with six state regulators and agreed to a $4.2 million penalty for failures in suspicious activity investigation and reporting, transaction-monitoring data integrity, and independent program review.
The OCC declined to treat that as dispositive. “Significant enforcement actions such as these,” the letter says, are “important to, but do not ultimately control,” its charter decisions. What counted was the record underneath. The agency found that, as a money services business (MSB), the transmitter has a record of failing to comply with the applicable MSB requirements, and that the proposed bank’s management and board have demonstrated a persistent inability to manage money-laundering and terrorist-financing risk sufficiently. The organizers also could not demonstrate experience with fiduciary activities.
Nineteen days earlier, the OCC conditionally approved Connectia Trust, N.A., the same charter type sought in the previous instance, for an uninsured national trust bank whose parent answers to Japan’s Financial Services Agency. It granted Connectia the fiduciary powers the prior example’s organizers could not support, over objections from four commenters and with seven conditions attached.
What the Filing Could Not Establish
The OCC’s first listed deficiency in the second case, the August 4th denial, is capital. The applicant proposed $50 million from Ali Niknam’s personal holdings; follow-up responses indicated that the funds would be paid to him as a dividend by bunq BV, the Dutch bank he also controls, which is not a parent of the U.S. applicant. Across written questions and interviews, the applicant “never clearly articulated how it would be initially capitalized,” and a revised figure of $58.3 million arrived without explanation. The agency separately found the proposed amount insufficient for the projected volume, risk profile and type of business.
The OCC also found that management and the board had not demonstrated knowledge or experience relevant to unsecured credit cards, the bank’s principal lending product, and that the assumptions behind its proposed credit-loss allowance were “not credible based on peer analysis.”
The letter states that the proposed president and chief executive — whom it does not name — “has little knowledge of national banking laws and regulations, proposes to be part-time,” and “plans to spend a majority of the year outside the States.” The agency also recorded “transparency concerns regarding inconsistencies in what [the applicant’s] management was communicating to the OCC.” It made the stated basis for an unfavorable finding on the general character and fitness of management, one of four statutory factors, which resolved against bunq.
Set that against a conditionally approved order from January under the same charter type that bunq sought, also foreign-controlled and also building a digital consumer bank. The OCC required it to open with no less than $504 million and recorded no question about management, credit or the source of the money. Foreign control did not sink bunq’s application. Capital adequacy, credit competence and the consistency of its own account of itself did.
What the Published Record Leaves Out
Most applications that would fail never generate a public document. The OCC works them out in pre-filing meetings, the applicant withdraws, or — per the same June bulletin — the agency returns the filing as materially deficient, “before engaging in any meaningful processing,” including where organizers have not defined products and services, “with particularity, including how they will be operationalized.” The OCC explains itself constantly and privately to the only party that needs to hear it.
That is what makes the published set worth reading. Two denials show where the floor is, not where the bar is, and the approvals show neither. Read them as the only version of the agency’s reasoning a compliance team can quote to its own board: close findings before the filing goes in, document where the capital comes from and seat an executive who can speak to U.S. banking laws and regulations.
There is another way to make the OCC explain its reasoning before approving an application. Four commenters challenged Connectia’s charter application. Their objections did not block approval, but they prompted the OCC to formally state that it had made a favorable finding on the profitability requirement in 12 CFR 5.20(f)(2)(i)(D).
That was the only explicit favorable finding I found in the 2026 approval record, and it concerned the same requirement that bunq failed to meet just a month later.
The Charter Bar Is Clearest in the OCC’s Denials
The OCC’s new publication policy makes denials more useful than approvals, but it does not make the chartering process transparent. A rejection is a post-mortem: it identifies the capital plan that did not hold together, the experience gap that could not be explained away or the compliance record that outweighed remediation. An approval, by contrast, generally confirms only that the agency reached a favorable judgment.
For fintechs considering a national charter, the practical implication is not to treat published denials as a checklist for barely clearing the floor. Treat them as evidence of the questions the OCC will press privately long before a decision is issued: Can the organizers substantiate the source and amount of capital? Does the board and management team match the proposed products, risk profile and fiduciary powers? Can the filing withstand scrutiny without inconsistencies?
The public record remains incomplete by design. Until the OCC gives comparable detail when it says yes, applicants will continue to learn most clearly from the firms it has told no.
