Federal Reserve Board Updates and Improves the Rules Governing Confidential Supervisory Information and FOIA Requests
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Key takeaways:
- On July 24, 2020, the Federal Reserve Board (“FRB”) finalized amendments to its Rules Regarding Availability of Information (“Final Rule”), just over one year after inviting public comment on an earlier draft and more than three decades since they were last substantially revised. The Final Rule makes various clarifying revisions, including to the definition and scope of confidential supervisory information (“CSI”) and the restrictions on sharing CSI within an organization, with third-party service providers and with other regulatory agencies. It also amends the FRB’s procedures for handling Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”) requests.
- Although the Final Rule stops short of fully harmonizing the FRB’s CSI regime with those of other federal banking agencies, it takes steps in that direction and, more generally, updates and modernizes the CSI framework in ways that are helpful to supervised financial institutions with at least one important exception.