General

The debit card surcharge prohibition bill, HB 3068 (Jose Menendez), is scheduled for Senate floor action as early as tomorrow. Business and Commerce Committee Chairman John Carona is the Senate Sponsor.

Please take a moment to call and/or email your member of the Texas Senate - right now - and let them know that this is an extremely important issue for your bank, that you strongly support this bill and you urge their support.

As is customary, IBAT will provide a thorough review of the Texas Legislative Session via a webinar conducted by Karen Neeley and Steve Scurlock on June 25, from 3:00 PM until 4:30 PM.  

There is no charge, and the program will be recorded for future reference. Additionally, our post-session white paper should be ready for distribution electronically prior to the program date.  

In order to provide additional clarification on the recently issued CFPB mortgage reforms, IBAT Regulatory Compliance Manager Kelly Goulart is releasing a series of white papers addressing each change contained in the seven major mortgage lending initiatives, six of which have been finalized by the CFPB (more or less).  

The third part of the series, focused on the Ability to Repay (ATR) and Qualified Mortgage (QM) rules, is now available on the IBAT website. 

Too big to fail (TBTF), and the need to end it once and for all received an additional boost from two Federal regulatory opinion leaders last week. Federal reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and OCC Comptroller Tom Curry, while not formally endorsing the Brown-Vitter concept, came out swinging last week calling for the need for higher capital requirements for the nation's largest banks.  The Brown-Vitter bill, S. 798, would mandate capital levels of 8% or greater for banks $50 billion and greater and 15% for banks with assets exceeding $500 billion.

Compared with many of the recent headline-grabbing news stories, [last] week's spate of economic statistics seem like cause for elation. No murder, no mayhem, just a slow-leak in Ten Year prices to [Friday] morning's yield of 1.90%. A monster 10.5% year-over-year jump in home prices nationwide is at least partly responsible for the slow motion sell-off. According to CoreLogic's Home Price Index Report, the largest gains happened in the places that needed it the most; Nevada, California, and Arizona. Yipee-Ki-Yay!

As a result of our recent website migration, portions of IBAT2GO, the official mobile application of IBAT, are temporarily suspended.  A new version of the app has been submitted to the Apple app store and we will notify you when Apple has approved it for download. Until then, the Legal Ease archive in the current version of IBAT2GO remains accessible. 

Thanks for your patience as we make the necessary updates and please let us know if you have any questions.