The Banker Next Door

This report from the OCC may prove to be one of the most consequential reports of the last 10 years. The 9 largest banks in the U.S. were caught ‘debanking’ clients for political and religious purposes. Obvious discrimination. But were these banks just following regulatory guidance behind reputational risk? Even if they were, it does not excuse what they did. This is a political issue. The Biden Administration weaponized banks to go after conservative individuals and Christian organizations. Egged on by wokeness, cancel culture, and political ideology, these banks went wild! The questions now are what should be done about it and how do we make sure this never happens again? In this report, the OCC provides examples, key observations, background of the debanking review, key policies covered, impacts of reputation risk practices, debanking decisions of interest, impacts on industry, and customer experience. The report concludes with bank responses to the executive order and OCC’s review and the OCC’s efforts to address debanking and promote fair access. This episode reviewed the OCC report Debanked: Guaranteeing fair banking for all Americans. Links to the press release and report are included below.
Link: OCC Releases Report on Large Banks’ Debanking Activities | OCC
Link: Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans

America is in a major race with China over AI. What are the stakes? Just about everything! Who will be the dominate power in the world hangs in the balance. This episode sought to look at who’s winning the AI race? Can China win and what happens if they do? Beyond business and consumer applications there are major concerns around Cyber warfare and Military use. Both sides have some advantages. America has a lead in Frontier models, datacenters (computational power) and the quality of microchips. China has a lead in manufacturing capability, supply chain components, and power generation. America is being held back in two major areas, manufacturing and power generation. Regulation and politics are hindering the efforts to bring much needed manufacturing back to the U.S. and the lack of development in nuclear and coal-based power sources over the last 40 plus years has come back to hinder the U.S. in a critical moment. China is not without its issues. It can develop cheap copycat AI models, but it does not have the compute power to deploy them. What can America do to win this race? This episode reviewed an article from The Epoch Times (subscription required) titled “Is America winning the AI race? We asked 10 experts.”

Bank News: Third Coast Bancshares to purchase Great Plains Bancshares for $240M. TowneBank to purchase Blueharbor Bank for $154M. Pinnacle Bancorp to purchase Southern Bancshares. Byline Bancorp recent purchase will not stop them from pursuing another M&A deal. Anchorage digital to purchase payout platform Routable. Peoples Bancorp could be taking risks with most recent bank purchase. M&F Bancorp continues to be pursued by Triad Business Bank with unsolicited offer. Home Bancshares continues to pursue M&A. Rain and Modern Treasury seek OCC trust banking charters. Upgrade applies for ILC banking charter. Payward seeks EU license through a bank acquisition. ICBA sues OCC over trust charters. OCC drops major debanking report. Bank of America, American Express, and SEB fines over AML violations. US Bank has not seen much demand for Stablecoins. Fiserv decided to pivot on FISUD. Jamie Dimon and Charlie Scharf discuss AI-driven deposit flight fears and risk of AI agents. U.S. bank seeks more small business growth. Apple Bank hopes to break through against large competitors. Truist sells personal loan unit. First Horizon sells residential mortgage portfolio. Warren pushes Epstein Bill. Powell probe is dead. New probe into Lisa Cook has been opened. Fed changes bank supervision structure. Gen Z and Millennials are satisfied with online banks and fintechs. This episode reviewed multiple articles from Banking Dive and S&P Global Market Intelligence (subscription required).

This video is a clip from BND: Strategy Room Live Stream on October 10, 2026. How are banks currently performing? Wall Street is expecting record bonuses again in 2026. Update on M&A deal activity. Loan growth continues to be good, but there is concern around increasing interest rates and how that may affect margins in the third and fourth quarters. Banks continue to see increases in auto lending. Finally, the Federal Reserve is considering changes to the current $10 billion-dollar regulatory asset threshold. This episode reviewed multiple articles from The Wall Street Journal and S&P Global (subscriptions required).

The Banker Next Door (BND) weekly live stream show. Strategy Room provides financial news, commentary, top stories in the business world, economic indicators, and all things banking for the week.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved plans to further open private markets or alternative assets to individual investors. Many investors are locked out of the best investments such as Hedge Funds, Private Equity, IPOs, private placement memorandums, etc. due to financial qualifications required by the SEC. Under current securities laws an individual must meet the financial criteria of an Accredited Investor. The current financial criteria is a net worth over $1 million (excluding your primary residence) or income over $200k (single) or $300k (married) in each of the prior two years. In 2020, the SEC added additional Professional Criteria, which allowed certain other individuals to qualify. The new proposal is to provide an exam that, if passed, would license individuals as an Accredited Investor. However, buyers beware! After many decades why would the SEC suddenly decide to become this generous? This episode reviewed multiple articles from CNBC and the definition of an Accredited Investor from the SEC website.
Link: SEC.gov | Accredited Investors

Nano Bank in Irvine, California has become the sixth bank failure of 2026! 2026 has now become the year with the largest number of bank failures this decade. The next largest year is 2017 with eight bank failures. In terms of asset size, the combined six bank failures this year account for approximately 1.41 billion is assets, which is minuscule compared to the $552 billion that was lost in 2023 with three of the largest bank failures in U.S. history. Nano Bank was a very troubled bank reporting a loss of $75 million for fiscal year 2025. Nano’s total assets ranged between $690M to $736M. The FDIC is estimating that this failure will cost the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) approximately $114M. Nano had trouble with regulators stretching back to 2020. Nano was under a consent order at one point and was constantly shuffling executives, board members, and investors. In addition, Nano had major credit problems with a large amount of bad loans, which ultimately sunk the bank. Nano follows a very similar pattern with the other five banks that failed in 2026. This episode reviewed an article from Banking Dive and S&P Global (subscription required). A link to the Banking Dive article is included below.  
Link: California’s Nano Banc fails | Banking Dive

This episode is an interview with Old Glory Bank CEO, Mike Ring. Before Mr. Ring became CEO of Old Glory Bank, he worked as an attorney; earning a JD and LLM in taxation. He started his own law firm specializing in corporate and securities law. Mr. Ring is also the founder of multiple other businesses including Haymon Sports and Katz Broadcasting. Mr. Ring is a veteran, having served honorably in the U.S. Air Force. In the interview, Mr. Ring and I cover a number of topics that range from the founding of Old Glory Bank, the type of products offered by the bank, the banks current customer base, and how Old Glory is seeking to expand its products in the near future with crypto and stablecoin offerings. Mr. Ring is very passionate about the ‘debanking’ that has occurred in the banking industry for political reasons in the last few years and seeks to ensure that no customer of Old Glory will ever be treated in that manner. In addition, we touch on the recent issue surrounding the bank’s capital position. Old Glory was scheduled to combine with a special purpose acquisition company and when that fell through the FDIC issued a corrective action stating that the bank was undercapitalized. Mr. Ring announced that Old Glory successfully raised another $8M and is once again adequately capitalized. Furthermore, the bank is extremely excited about their future growth potential. As Mr. Ring states: “We are just getting started!” Included below is a link to Old Glory Bank’s website.   
 Link: Old Glory Bank | Home

What is ‘Effective Altruism’ or EA? Is it a cult, philosophy, or just a bunch of weirdo’s living together at houses in San Fran? Kind of a mix of all three. EA has grown as a ‘philosophy’ over the last 25 years. The problem with this? Many of its acolytes permeate elite academia and Silicon Valley. Namely, OpenAI, Anthropic, the failed FTX, and the almost failed Situational Awareness. The idea behind EA is quantitative analysis to figure out how to maximize the use of money in a way to ‘save the most lives.’ The more lives you save? I don’t know, apparently there is some kind of points system? While EA purports to save the world, the people associated with this movement come off as a bunch of hypocrites that just like lavish vacations and want to be billionaires at all costs. Examples: Sam Bankman Fried and Dario Amodei. The EA subculture has embedded itself in many of the top AI companies and these employees are causing trouble. Should we be concerned with EA acolytes? Yes, we should. This episode reviewed a definition and explanation of ‘Effective Altruism’ from Wikipedia and an article from The Wall Street Journal (Subscription required) titled “Things will never be chill again: The doomers who shaped the AI safety freakout.”

There have been several deals in the last few years featuring fintechs buying banks. Some examples include SoFi purchasing Pacific Bank and Lending Club purchasing Radius Bank. But with the recent announcement of Valley National Bancorp purchasing Bluevine, could the script be about to flip? Could this be the first of multiple transactions involving banks purchasing fintechs? This deal is a game changer and it certainly puts everyone on notice. Banks will need to change their strategy in the years ahead and purchasing a fintech that already has the technology or products that they need is easier than starting from scratch. Conversely, why are banks attractive to fintechs? Multiple reasons that include strong deposit franchise, established lending relationships, sound regulatory and compliance track record, and size and infrastructure. This episode reviewed multiple articles from S&P Global Market Intelligence (subscription required) and a blog post from PCBB titled “Is your CFI on a Fintech’s radar?” A link to the PCBB blog post is included below.
Link: Is Your CFI on a Fintech’s Radar?