RESPA is two regulations sharing a name. One governs the referral economy around a real estate closing — who may pay whom, and for what. The other governs mortgage servicing after the loan funds. Institutions tend to be strong on one and weak on the other, and examiners test both.

What RESPA Covers

The Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act was enacted in 1974 and is implemented by Regulation X. It applies to federally related mortgage loans secured by a

The Community Reinvestment Act is the one banking regulation whose consequences are mostly strategic rather than penal. There is no CRA fine. What there is instead is a public rating, a public evaluation describing your institution's performance in detail, and a regulatory veto over expansion if that rating is poor.

For a community bank, that makes CRA a business planning matter that happens to be administered by the compliance function.

What the CRA

HMDA is the only major banking regulation whose entire output is a data file. There are no disclosures to deliver, no waiting periods to observe, and no consumer to protect at the point of the transaction. There is just a register — and the register is used by regulators, community groups, journalists, and researchers to evaluate whether your institution lends fairly.

That is what makes HMDA errors uniquely expensive. A misreported data point is not just a reporting violation; it ...

The last several years have been the most active period of AML rulemaking since the USA PATRIOT Act, and unusually for compliance topics, much of it has not settled. Rules have been finalized, challenged in court, narrowed by interim rules, and had compliance dates moved.

This post covers the developments a bank compliance function needs to be tracking, what each one means operationally, and — importantly — which of them are still in motion.

The Legislative

The BSA/AML risk assessment is the document examiners open first, and the one most institutions treat as an annual formality. That mismatch explains a large share of program findings: the assessment says one thing, the controls do another, and nobody noticed because the assessment was written to be filed rather than to be used.

This is a working method for building one that actually drives the program.

What the Risk Assessment Is For

Its purpose is to identify the

The Currency Transaction Report is the most mechanical filing in the BSA regime and, for that reason, the one institutions most often get quietly wrong. There is no judgment call about suspicion and no narrative to write — which means errors are almost always about aggregation, party identification, or exemptions that were never maintained.

This guide covers the filing rules precisely, then spends real time on exemptions, because that is where most institutions leave money and staff ...

Ask three compliance officers how many pillars an AML program has and you may get three answers. Four is the traditional count. Five is correct after the customer due diligence rule. Six is what many practitioners now say, and they are not wrong either.

The disagreement is not pedantry — it reflects a real change in how examiners evaluate programs. This article explains each pillar, why the count moved, and what "reasonably designed" means when applied to each one.

Why the