Comptroller opposes American Express resolution plan feedback

Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould issued a statement on September 29 explaining his vote against a joint resolution plan letter that the FDIC and Federal Reserve Board sent to American Express. The statement renews his call to rework Dodd-Frank Section 165(d) resolution plans, which he says remain opaque and unfair.

Key takeaways

• Gould voted against the joint FDIC and Fed feedback letter to American Express.
• He argues the letter asks a non-systemically important bank to address significant concerns without detailing them.
• He says the agencies should revise the joint rule so that resolution planning does not apply below the statutory threshold of $250 billion in total consolidated assets.
• The same day, the FDIC and Fed published feedback letters on 15 banking organizations’ 2025 plans.

The news

Resolution plans, often called living wills, describe how a large firm could be wound down in an orderly way if it failed. Section 165(d) of the Dodd-Frank Act requires the plans, and the FDIC and Federal Reserve review them and send feedback.

Gould said in the excerpts released that “opacity and uncertainty remain hallmarks of the resolution planning process.” He described three problems with the American Express feedback. The agencies tell a non-systemically important bank to address significant concerns with its strategy without detailing them or explaining the consequences if it does not. They retain full discretion to take more severe action if the concerns are not resolved in the next plan. And the options that would likely best protect the company from those consequences are, in his view, costly and inappropriate for the organization.

He added that although the feedback is not formally labeled a “shortcoming” or “deficiency,” raising the prospect of large-scale restructuring on that basis is unacceptable. Banks, he said, should be built to serve the needs of their communities and customers, and the system has gone too far in forcing banks to structure themselves to fail. His proposed minimum fix: because the agencies must collect and review plans from firms above the statutory threshold but are not required to deliver feedback unrelated to financial stability, they should change the joint rule so planning does not apply to companies below $250 billion in assets.

The Fed’s separate release said the agencies reviewed 2025 plans from 15 banking organizations with more than $250 billion in assets, including American Express, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and UBS, and did not identify any shortcomings or deficiencies in those submissions. Gould’s statement follows a statement in May 2026 explaining his abstention from an FDIC vote on resolution plan feedback.

Our analysis

The dispute is about what counts as a regulatory finding. By the agencies’ own labels the American Express letter found no shortcoming or deficiency, yet Gould reads its language about significant concerns as a threat of consequences. The tension is common in supervision: feedback that is formally informal can still change what a firm’s board and management feel they must do.

The proposed fix is a narrow one. Gould does not argue to eliminate the statutory requirement, only to stop the agencies from applying it, through their own rule, to firms below the threshold. American Express was reviewed in the same group as 14 other organizations above $250 billion in assets, so his objection concerns the content and tone of the feedback as much as the threshold.

Room for disagreement

The FDIC and Fed released feedback that identified no shortcomings or deficiencies for the 15 organizations. Supporters of detailed plans argue that planning for a firm’s failure is cheap relative to the cost of an unplanned one, and that agencies should be free to raise concerns early. The release does not set out the reasoning of the other voting members.

What to watch

Whether the agencies revisit the joint rule is the main question. A change to the asset threshold would need a rulemaking with public comment. Gould says the faults he describes are ones he has previously discussed in detail, so the argument is likely to continue.