Twenty state attorneys general, led by Illinois’ Kwame Raoul, sent a letter to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve asking them to block two pending bank acquisitions: OppFi’s $130 million purchase of Arizona’s BNC National Bank and Enova’s $369 million deal for Grasshopper Bank.
The AGs’ theory: national bank charters let lenders export interest rates from states with no caps, gutting the 36% rate ceilings many states set for small loans. “These arrangements are deliberate efforts to avoid state usury laws,” they wrote, urging regulators to deny charter access to “entities that have a track record of brazenly attempting to evade state law.”
This is a rerun. The same coalition flagged subprime mortgages before 2008, and they’re framing this fight the same way, a warning regulators can heed now or regret later. The novelty here isn’t the complaint, it’s the mechanism: buy a bank outright and the “rent-a-bank” scrutiny that’s dogged fintech-bank partnerships for years arguably disappears, since the lender becomes the charter holder.
Both companies pushed back. OppFi called its model “highly compliant” and said federal oversight would strengthen it. Enova’s Kirk Chartier noted that many of the same AGs recently defended a state bank’s rate-export rights in an amicus brief, a contradiction he didn’t let go unmentioned.
No hearing date yet. The OCC now decides whether “brazen evasion” is a permitted business model or a charter-killer.
— James Okafor