FDIC moves to bring stablecoin issuers under Bank Secrecy Act regime
Stablecoin issuers in the United States are moving closer to the same financial-crime obligations that banks have lived with for decades. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has approved a proposed rule that would apply Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) and sanctions compliance standards to the permitted payment stablecoin issuers (PPSIs) it oversees, the latest step in building out the supervisory machinery behind the GENIUS Act.
The notice of proposed rulemaking, approved by the FDIC Board on a 3-0 vote and detailed in a press release dated Friday 22 May, would require these issuers to comply with anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) rules and with economic sanctions programmes. That includes reporting requirements set by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the Office of Foreign Assets Control. The proposal would also align the FDIC's supervision and enforcement of these AML/CFT programmes with FinCEN's own framework. Comments will be accepted for 60 days after the NPRM is published in the Federal Register.
Why it matters for banks
The FDIC is positioning itself as the primary federal regulator for PPSIs that are subsidiaries of insured state nonmember banks and state savings associations it has approved to issue payment stablecoins. In other words, the agency is treating regulated stablecoin issuance as an extension of the banking perimeter rather than a parallel crypto track. For banks weighing whether to issue a stablecoin through a subsidiary, the message is that the compliance burden will mirror the AML and sanctions regime they already run, not a lighter alternative.
This is the third building block the FDIC has put in place since the GENIUS Act became the country's first cryptocurrency statute in July. The agency issued an initial NPRM in December setting out how supervised institutions could seek to issue stablecoin payments, then extended its comment period to 18 May. In April it proposed a prudential framework covering reserve assets, redemption, capital and risk-management standards. Taken together, the three rulemakings sketch a fairly conventional banking-style oversight model for an instrument that was, until recently, almost entirely unregulated.
Source: PYMNTS.
