Fed Aims to Speed Up Bank Merger Reviews With Better Tracking

The Federal Reserve said it would speed up its reviews of proposed mergers involving community lenders and other corporate activities after the central bank’s watchdog found the approval process took longer during the Biden administration.

Median processing times on merger reviews for deals involving small community banks with less than $1 billion in assets increased by 40% from 2021 to 2024, a report from the Fed’s inspector general released Tuesday said.

Deals with other community banks that had less than $10 billion experienced similar growing delays, the inspector general’s office found.

A FedEZFile system the Fed deployed in 2022 lacked tracking for key milestones and suffered from other data problems, according to the report, which also cited issues at the Fed delegating tasks and communicating with other regulators.

The Fed agreed with the report’s findings and said it was already taking steps to address the problems. In October, the central bank updated the FedEZFile system to address the data-tracking problems and it is working to get staff up to speed on the changes, according to the report.

The Trump administration’s banking regulators have prioritized expediting their reviews on bank applications, including for proposed mergers.

“In my view, the purgatory of a long application process is another form of regulatory ‘inaction’ that must be eliminated,” Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman said in a February 2025 speech.

Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould has focused on speeding up licensing and merger reviews at his agency, and President Donald Trump last year signed legislation formally killing a Biden-era OCC rule that called for stricter reviews of some bank mergers. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. approved similar rollbacks.

Bank mergers involving community bank sellers ticked back up overall in 2025, after a decline from 2022 to 2024 amid higher interest rates, according to Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City research.

Federal regulators also signed off on several high-profile deals involving larger banks over the past year, including Capital One Financial Corp.'s acquisition of Discover Financial Services and Fifth Third Bancorp’s purchase of Comerica Inc.