Fair Lending Insights and Highlights

Fair lending has been a hot topic for some time now, and we have written about various initiatives, settlements, and consent orders in previous articles. Many of the banks involved in recent fair lending cases have been very large banks; however, in late August, the Department of Justice (DOJ) entered into a $1.5 million settlement agreement with a smaller bank in Oklahoma, American Bank of Oklahoma (the Bank), for redlining and failure to comply with fair lending laws and regulations between 2017 and 2021, despite previous warnings of deficiencies by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC). American Bank of Oklahoma has approximately $380 million in assets. This was the eighth redlining settlement since the announcement of the DOJ's "Combatting Redlining Initiative" in 2021. Continue reading >