A U.S. regulator's plan to clarify that nationally chartered trust banks can also process payments, safekeep assets and engage in other non-fiduciary activity alongside their expressly permitted fiduciary activities would undercut a key point of contention put forward by mainstream lenders. Under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's current chartering language, only banks that act solely as fiduciaries by, for example, investing a client's assets instead of simply holding them in custody, explicitly qualify for a national-bank trust charter, a condition that mainstream banks argue excludes neobanks, cryptocurrency exchanges and other fintechs from holding one. "The policy is...
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