Strengthen the Community Reinvestment Act

Regulators shall strengthen the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), which was designed to help financial institutions meet the credit needs of their community, by:

• Vigorously enforcing Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) and fair housing laws in instances where lending discrimination is believed to exist.
• Enforcing antitrust laws especially with respect to mergers that could lead to bank branch closures in low-to-moderate income (LMI) communities in order to keep competition.
• Allowing other banking companies to enter the retail banking sector and allowing said companies to apply for Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance.
• Extending CRA credit (equally weighted) for service & investment tests to Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) and Community Development Banks (CDBs) to reach market.
• Increasing government funding through the US Treasury for CDFIs.
• Explicitly quantifying measurements needs to determine benchmarks (including a community investment benchmark) and eliminating subjectivity associated with local regulatory interpretation
• Creating centralized control to ensure consistency and uniformity vs having multiple agencies in charge