A new breed of financial regulator in Washington seeking to level the playing field for financial technology innovators appears to have opened the door to a world of new possibilities for fintechs and crypto companies — much to the dismay of banks and credit unions.
Since April, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) has fielded nearly a dozen applications from firms seeking national trust bank charters in order to provide digital asset services to customers nationwide. The applicants include familiar names like Ripple, Coinbase, Circle, Stripe and Crypto.com.
The current comptroller of the currency created this opportunity, but long before he ever held that title. Jonathan Gould actually put the wheels in motion while serving as the OCC’s chief counsel in the final days of President Donald Trump’s first administration. On Jan. 11, 2021, Gould released Interpretive Letter 1176, which effectively states his position that current federal statutes allow for national trust banks to engage in nonfiduciary activities, reversing a prior interpretation and opening the door for these institutions to provide digital asset services.
One crypto firm, Anchorage Digital Bank, received a national trust bank charter just days after Gould issued the 2021 letter. After a pause in such charter approvals during President Joe Biden’s administration, President Donald Trump reopened the door when he came back into office by nominating Gould to be his new comptroller of the currency. A flood of applications from fintechs and crypto firms started coming in well before the Senate confirmed Gould in July and continued after he spoke about the need for regulators to embrace new technologies during September’s AI-Native Banking and Fintech Conference at the University of Utah.
Gould told event attendees that regulators shouldn’t engage in “shadow banning” technologies that are hard to do in a safe and sound manner. “That is not the right strategy,” he said. “That is a failed strategy, from a long-term, and from a risk-management perspective. It’s our job to work with industry to figure out how to do these activities in a safe and sound manner going forward.”
To date, approval for all of the crypto and fintech trust bank charter applications is still pending. FinXTech reached out to several of the firms or their attorneys for comment, but all declined. But an OCC spokesperson sent an emailed statement on the approval process, which reads in part: “The OCC reviews all charter applications on a case-by-case basis consistent with statutory factors and our high supervisory standards. We welcome applications from applicants that believe they meet these requirements, and we will conduct a rigorous review to determine if they, in fact, do so. The recent rise in applications is consistent with activity returning after several years in which charter approval was minimal.”
Brian Laverdure, senior vice president for digital assets and innovation policy at the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA), says he has a wide range of concerns about the national trust charters. “I mean, one, there is the question of whether Interpretive Letter 1176, which a lot of them are citing, is actually legal and valid,” he says.
ICBA representatives have voiced concerns over Gould’s interpretation of national trust bank law repeatedly and continuously, especially throughout 2025. The ICBA is not alone in their opposition. They joined the Consumer Bankers Association, National Bankers Association and America’s Credit Unions in signing onto a July letter the American Bankers Association (ABA) wrote and sent to the OCC which expressed opposition to a number of the pending applications, as well as the expanded provisions of the charter. They question not only the legal basis for Gould’s interpretation but also whether the applicants intend to do any of the things for which the national trust banks were originally established.
What Was the Original Purpose of National Trust Banks?
National trust bank charters were created to allow entities to provide fiduciary and custodial services, such as estate administration, investment management and asset safekeeping. Max Bonici, partner at the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, says national trust banks can now do a bit more. Not only can they provide custodial services over customer digital assets, they can also issue stablecoins and even handle digital payment transactions and settlements. And they can do all of that under the oversight of just one federal regulator, avoiding the hassle of multiple state regulatory bodies and money transmitter licenses. Plus, they can bypass state laws and state-level consumer protections. “You get the benefit of federal preemption, and you have absolute clarity as to what you are, what you can do. And you don’t need any state’s permission to do it,” Bonici says.
Even under Gould’s interpretation, national trust banks are not allowed to make loans or take deposits. Andrew Morris, director of innovation and technology for America’s Credit Unions, acknowledges these firms would not be taking insured deposits, but says the OCC’s policy shift blurs that line too. “If you’re talking about a business model that is premised on the custody of things like stablecoins, which can be sort of held almost like a dollar and can be transacted almost like a dollar, you have to ask yourself practically, is this like a deposit account?” Morris asks.
A national trust bank charter would also make these firms eligible for Federal Reserve master accounts, which would allow them to access the Fed’s payment rails, such as FedWire and FedNow. While a recent federal appeals court ruling concluded the Fed has discretion to deny master accounts to riskier entities such as crypto banks, Fed Gov. Christopher Waller is seeking to establish a “skinny” master account that would at least give these institutions access to those payment rails with restrictions.
The lobbying groups are also opposed to that measure and would also like to see a delay in approvals for any of the charter applications in question to allow for more transparency and additional public input on the process. Laverdure says it would be in the OCC’s best interest as well.
“If something goes wrong, or maybe rather when something goes wrong — because we have seen a lot of volatility, a lot of failures in the digital asset ecosystem — what is going to happen? Who is going to fix that? How is it going to be fixed?” Laverdure asks. “That’s going to continue to be one of our top concerns.”
“There’s a little bit of regulatory risk there,” says David Zaring, a professor of legal studies and business ethics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. But Zaring argued in his March 2025 paper, Skinny Charters: Rebuilding the Banking Regulatory Perimeter, that this sort of disruption in the national trust bank space is nothing new. “The OCC has given trust charters to asset managers, payroll processors, and even to a small college,” Zaring writes. “In this way, the trust charter sits on the very margin of the separation of banking and commerce and is a conduit for banks to expand their business beyond the traditional forms of banking, and for commercial firms to dip a toe in waters otherwise forbidden to them.”
But Laverdure argues fintechs and crypto firms present potential risks that far outweigh those of other entities. “Comparing a digital asset related entity to a small college? I mean, I don’t even think it’s apples to oranges, right? They’re completely different in terms of the scope of activities, and the complexity associated with those activities,” he says.
Zaring believes it will be important for the OCC to ensure these initial charters are backed by sound business models that can withstand regulatory scrutiny. “Banking regulators have never been comfortable with — ‘let’s start up 10 banks and then hope that five of them make it,’” he says. “That is just not in their DNA. And so, I would expect to see some growing pains in that kind of a relationship.”
To Brian Graham, a partner at Klaros Group, a law firm that works with both banks and fintechs, it is clear banks and credit unions are not just concerned with the OCC’s legal interpretation of national trust bank activities or the regulatory risks associated with them.
“If they didn’t see it as a competitive threat, even if they thought it was unfair, they probably wouldn’t wrest themselves to write a letter. It’s in their view, the combination of the two that makes it important,” Graham says. “Whether those are fair or not is really a matter for Congress because it created the rules and the laws that govern these things. And if they want to draw the lines in a different place, they can.”
Morris hopes it won’t have to come to that. “I don’t think that the OCC is necessarily ignoring the concerns that are being raised, but at the same time, I think the pace at which these applications are coming in is alarming because if there isn’t a more deliberate process for reviewing these things, then yeah, I think it may be the case that Congress feels that it has to act, especially if things go wrong with these types of entities,” he says.
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