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SDBA UpdatesSDBA EventsABA Banking Journal: ABA unveils key policy priorities for 2025January 14, 2025
With the pending change in administration and the start of the 119th Congress, the American Bankers Association today released its 2025 Blueprint for Growth outlining ABA’s top policy priorities for the year. The Blueprint was developed by ABA’s Government Relations Council, with members representing banks across the industry, and approved by the association’s board of directors. The document will be shared with every member of Congress and with officials in the incoming Trump-Vance administration. “2025 will be a year of significant change that we hope will offer an opportunity to reset the conversation around banking regulation,” ABA President and CEO Rob Nichols said in a statement. “This year’s Blueprint for Growth reflects the input and real-world perspective of bank leaders from across the nation, and it will guide our work to advance policies that help grow our economy and empower America’s banks to best serve their customers, clients and communities.” The Blueprint focuses on three overarching policy priorities: Drive a healthy economy for all, pursue rational regulation to preserve Main Street access to credit and capital, and foster a competitive financial services market. Drive a Healthy Economy for AllTax policy. Pursue pro-growth tax policy that encourages investment and expands opportunity for all Americans by ensuring a competitive corporate tax rate and continuing the Section 199A pass-through deduction, a provision that enables many community banks to play a vital role in local economic development. ACRE. Enact the Access to Credit for our Rural Economy Act, which will sustain and grow rural America by lowering the cost of credit for farmers and ranchers financing agricultural real estate as well as the cost of homeownership in 17,000 rural communities. Mission-driven banks. Support the work of Minority Depository Institutions and Community Development Financial Institutions — banks that are uniquely focused on serving communities of color and low-to-moderate income communities — by creating a CDFI investment tax credit that would incentivize long-term capital investment in these vital institutions. Housing. Approach housing policy holistically by supporting initiatives that create equitable, affordable and sustainable housing opportunities across all communities while ensuring liquidity to primary and secondary markets, including through government-sponsored enterprises and the Federal Home Loan Banks. Fraud. Pursue an “all of government” approach to combatting financial fraud to protect consumers and reduce the number of Americans who fall victim to scams. Pursue Rational RegulationSmall-business lending data collection (Section 1071). Work to repeal Section 1071 while calling on the CFPB to pause implementation and begin a process to formally withdraw the rule as we pursue ongoing litigation. Interchange (Durbin Amendment). Oppose government mandates on credit card routing and urge the Federal Reserve to put low- and moderate-income consumers before the needs of large retailers by withdrawing its proposal to impose misguided debit card price controls that will raise the cost of basic checking accounts. Community Reinvestment Act. While continuing our litigation, advocate against agency overreach and for a modernized CRA rule that encourages bank lending to low-and moderate-income individuals and communities. Bank capital. Provide a “quantitative impact study” and other data analysis that show the true cost to the economy of proposed higher capital standards, which would allow stakeholders to evaluate potential impact on credit availability for specific sectors, including low- and moderate-income borrowers. SAFER banking. Pass the SAFER Banking Act to get state-sanctioned cannabis cash off the street and into regulated financial institutions, making our communities safer and the cannabis industry more transparent to regulators, tax authorities and law enforcement. Open banking (Section 1033). Delay implementation and finalize a CFPB rule to supervise data aggregators before significantly overhauling the 1033 rule to address scope, liability and cost. Credit card programs. Delay implementation and withdraw the CFPB’s rule on credit card late fees to preserve access to credit for low-and moderate-income borrowers as litigation remains active. Foster a Competitive Financial Services MarketDeposit insurance reform. At a minimum, lawmakers should give the FDIC the authority and flexibility it needs to enable a timely response to crises, ensuring fair treatment across banks of all sizes and reducing reliance on the systemic risk exemption. Credit unions. Scrutinize whether credit unions are meeting their statutory objective of serving low-to-moderate-income communities in a robust, demonstrable way that justifies their preferential tax treatment over community banks and evenly apply regulatory requirements, including the Community Reinvestment Act, to banks and credit unions. Digital asset regulation. Bring stablecoins inside the banking regulatory perimeter, and require equivalent capital, liquidity and consumer protection standards across all stablecoin providers, ensuring banks are not disincentivized relative to nonbank providers and have the regulatory clarity they need to custody digital assets. National bank preemption. Defend the dual banking system, a pillar of economic strength that spurs innovation and empowers banks to serve every market in the United States, from states’ efforts to assert authority over basic Back to TopABA Fraudcast: One community bank’s fight against a mass text scamJanuary 14, 2025
Community banks can be targets of large-scale fraud, just like larger banks. On the inaugural episode of the ABA Fraudcast, former ABA Chair Dan Robb, president and CEO of Jonesburg State Bank in Missouri, describes the recent targeting of his bank by fraudsters who texted thousands of residents of his community, seeking access to customer accounts. What followed for Robb and his team were fast lessons on all the areas his bank was prepared for, and a few challenges that were surprising. “We are no longer dealing with a mom-and-pop criminal,” says ABA’s Paul Benda, Fraudcast host. “This is institutional crime.”
If you can’t see the audio player, click here to listen to this week’s episode. Back to TopCISA News: Top 5 Weakest Security Configurations and How to Fix Them December 30, 2024 | The Center for Internet Security, Inc. (CIS®) Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) team
It is critical to address these issues by keeping your software updated, using secure configurations such as by implementing the CIS Benchmarks™, and engaging services such as the CIS Security Operations Center (SOC), Cyber Incident Response Team (CIRT), and CIS Red Team, as appropriate. In this blog post, we'll analyze these issues with the aim of helping your technical staff harden your organization's configurations. Note: CIS sent notifications to the individual organizations observed in our data. We encourage you to check your networks, as passive profiling often produces false negatives. 1. Vulnerable Versions of SonicWall OSOn August 23, 2024, SonicWall published an advisory for CVE-2024-40766, an improper access control vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.8 that impacts SonicWall firewalls. This vulnerability can give cyber threat actors (CTAs) unauthorized resource access and enable them to crash the firewall. CISA observed exploitation of this vulnerability in the wild; additional reporting indicated that Akira ransomware affiliates were exploiting it, often for initial access. Researchers noted that multi-factor authentication (MFA) was disabled in all observed instances of Akira exploiting this vulnerability. Recommendations
2. Running End-of-Life ProductsEnd-of-life products are products no longer supported and updated by their developers. Any vulnerabilities impacting these products will not be patched. According to a CIS passive vulnerability scan, 91% of the devices running end-of-life products were vulnerable to CVEs, including some vulnerabilities with a CVSS of 10. This score indicates the potential for severe impact, such as unauthenticated remote code execution. What's more, 84% of the vulnerabilities were at least two years old, with many over 15 years old. Internet-Facing devices with major vulnerabilities lacking patches don't just create ample opportunity for CTAs to compromise a network. They also increase the potential severity of the attack. Data collected by IBM indicates that the average cost of a breach caused by unpatched software between March 2023 and February 2024 was $4.33 million. Recommendations
3. Internet-Exposed RDP and SMBRemote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Server Message Block (SMB) exposed on the internet present a great risk to enterprise security and an opportunity for CTAs. RDP allows smooth, seamless, and widely available remote access and offers an appealing target for CTAs, with reports indicating that RDP traffic comprises 37% of all threat actor traffic. Meanwhile, CTAs commonly target SMB for similar reasons and often leverage malicious SMB access for lateral movement and file transfer. CIS’s passive vulnerability scan discovered devices across customer networks that allowed RDP and SMB connections from the internet. These could easily lead to compromise through exploitation of vulnerabilities or credential attacks. Furthermore, some of these devices enabled anonymous access to SMB, which could expose the customer without additional exploitation by a CTA. Recommendations
4. Exposed DatabasesDatabases are among the most sought-after targets for threat actors since they often contain sensitive information. It is therefore critical to ensure that only authorized users can access integral databases. The CIS CTI team identified databases accessible over the open internet on CIS customers’ networks, including some that did not require a user account to view. Even databases that do require a login are often accessible either through breached credentials or exploitation of a vulnerability. Once a CTA accesses the database, they can exfiltrate the data to leak, sell, or leverage the information for further malicious activity. Recommendations
5. Failure to Remediate Existing CompromiseFinally, the CIS CTI team identified devices that appeared to have an ongoing compromise. These machines were identified by searching for services that matched signatures for instances of Cobalt Strike, web shells, and other malicious software. Detecting compromise promptly is important because longer response times typically lead to increased remediation costs. According to IBM's 2024 report, the average data breach took 258 days to identify and contain between March 2023 and February 2024, but breaches that took over 200 days to contain were 34% more expensive than breaches that were contained in under 200 days during that same time period. Recommendations
Back to TopABA Banking Journal: ABA, state bankers associations ask Trump to pause all open regulatory actionsJanuary 13, 2025
The American Bankers Association and 52 state bankers associations are urging President-elect Trump to halt work on all open regulatory actions during his first day in office and conduct a comprehensive review of regulations created in the past four years, pointing to what they said has been an onslaught of “questionable and unnecessary policy actions.” In a joint letter to Trump, the associations asked for the regulatory pause and for the president-elect to extend the effective dates for finalized regulations until his administration has time to review and assess the policies. They also requested a review of agency guidance and pending agency litigation. The groups urged Trump to direct the Treasury secretary to initiate a comprehensive review of the current regulatory rulebook, paying particular attention to the changes enacted over the past four years “to assess the cumulative impact of these rules and how they are suppressing access to capital and credit across the country” For the past few years, the federal banking agencies, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and capital markets regulators “have pursued an aggressive and misguided regulatory agenda, upending longstanding, tested banking practices with questionable and unnecessary policy actions that undermine our members’ ability to provide capital and credit to Main Street,” the associations said. They cited examples ranging the CFPB’s attempts further restrict bank fees to bank merger guidance from multiple agencies “designed to freeze and disincentivize transactions.” “ABA and our member banks have participated in good faith in the regulatory process, offering data-driven feedback through comment letters and hundreds of banker meetings in an effort to shape reasonable, economically grounded regulatory outcomes,” ABA and the associations said. “But all too often, the input from 4,500 banks was ignored, and in some cases, regulators made decisions to overshoot their legal authority altogether. This has led ABA and some state associations to file an unprecedented seven lawsuits challenging statutory overreach and process failures.” The associations said they appreciated Trump’s commitment to reducing burdensome regulations and promoting policies that will create economic growth. “The process of amending or withdrawing agency actions can be slow, but these are steps you can take on day one to prevent further harmful regulations from taking root,” they said. ABA Banking Journal: CFPB drops proposed ban on NSF fees for instantaneous transactionsJanuary 13, 2025 
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is withdrawing a proposed rule to prevent financial institutions from charging nonsufficient funds fees for transactions that are instantaneously declined, according to an advanced notice in the Federal Register. The bureau will instead consider a “more comprehensive approach” that may involve restricting other NSF fees. The CFPB proposed last year proposed banning NSF and other fees for ATM withdrawals, debit card purchases, peer-to-peer payments or other transactions that are declined “instantaneously or near-instantaneously.” The bureau alleged the fees represent an abusive practice under the Consumer Financial Protection Act’s prohibition on unfair, deceptive or abusive acts or practices. However, it also acknowledged that NSF fees are rarely charged on instantaneous transactions and that the rule was meant to prevent the practice from becoming more common. The proposed rule was part of a broader push by the Biden administration to restrict so-called “junk fees” charged by various industries. It is unclear whether President-elect Trump will prioritize the issue. The American Bankers Association was among the many critics of the proposal and urged the CFPB to withdraw the rule. The CFPB “conjures up a bank fee that the bureau itself concedes few—if any—banks charge and proposes a rule to prevent banks from charging this mysterious fee in the future,” ABA President and CEO Rob Nichols said when the proposal was first announced. “As an independent regulator, the bureau should leave politics to the campaign trail.” The CFPB said it received nearly 8,000 comments in response to the proposed rule. Based on comments in favor of the proposal, the bureau concluded that “practices involving the charging of NSF fees on other types of transactions may also be abusive for reasons similar to those discussed in the proposal.” Since those were outside the original scope of the proposed rule, it decided to withdraw the rule and “consider whether consumers similarly lack understanding of other NSF fees to determine whether a broader rulemaking would be appropriate.” Back to Top 2025 Scenes of South Dakota Calendar
SDBA State Legislative DayFebruary 12, 2025 | Pierre
Tri-State Trust Conference - SAVE THE DATE!April 22-24, 2025 | Fargo, ND
GSB Human Resources Management SchoolApril 28-May 2, 2025 | Madison, WI
Scholarships are available! Applications are DUE February 14. Apply HERE! Question of the Week Q: Our bank is planning on providing immediate (same-day) availability for certain deposits that were previously only subject to (and disclosed as) next-day availability. When would we need to send notice of this change to our customers? A: Under Regulation CC’s 12 CFR 229.18(e), a bank is usually obligated to send notice to its customers (more precisely, its “holders of consumer accounts”) at least 30 days before implementing a change to the bank’s funds availability policy that would affect such accounts. However, that same section of the rule states that if the change to the policy expedites the availability of funds – such as an update to grant same-day availability to certain deposits that were earlier restricted to only next-day availability – then notice of that change may be disclosed “not later than 30 days after the implementation.” Note, though, that the bank certainly isn’t precluded from still providing advanced notice even in these cases, if they so choose, as a matter of customer courtesy or transparency (for example). Learn how to put compliance management solutions from Compliance Alliance to work for your bank, by contacting (888) 353-3933 or [email protected] and ask for our Membership Team. For timely compliance updates, subscribe to Bankers Alliance’s email newsletters. Back to Top SDBA eNews Archive
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The brand new ABA Fraudcast will be published every two weeks, on this site, in ABA Daily Newsbytes and wherever you listen to and subscribe to your favorite podcasts.
Extra copies of our 2025 Scenes of South Dakota Calendar are available to purchase. This newly designed calendar features photo submissions by South Dakota bankers, their family members, and friends.
SDBA’s Legislative Day is your opportunity to stay informed on both state and federal legislation which could impact the banking industry. This is your opportunity to actively participate in shaping the future of banking in our state. This gathering promises insightful conversations, networking, and direct engagement with key policymakers.
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