Cliff Stanford, chair of Alston & Bird’s Financial Services Group and a former Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta attorney, was quoted in a recent American Banker article, “Fed Supervision Reform Funnels More Authority to Washington” (subscription required), about the Federal Reserve’s plan to consolidate bank supervision into five regions.
Cliff said the Fed has successfully centralized functions for decades, pointing to the consolidation of payments processing after the September 11 attacks. He said the 2023 bank failures and a recent supervisory review may represent a similar tipping point—“an opportunity to move away from 12 hierarchies to better accomplish the supervisory mission of the Fed.”