WASHINGTON—Top U.S. banking regulators are poised to overhaul how banks lend hundreds of billions of dollars annually in lower-income communities, after scrapping a Trump-era revamp that had divided regulators and industry officials.
The latest proposal to modernize rules for the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act is set to be announced Thursday and aims to ensure lending to lower-income individuals and small businesses is distributed more evenly where banks do business. Existing rules focus on bank activities around their physical branches. Those rules are outdated in a world in which much financial activity happens online, both bankers and community advocates say.
