Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

The profile

The OCC is an independent bureau of the US Department of the Treasury and charters, regulates and supervises all national banks, federal savings associations and the federal branches and agencies of foreign banks. It takes no appropriations from Congress and is funded by assessments on the institutions it supervises. Jonathan V. Gould became Comptroller of the Currency on 15 July 2025. The charter that matters on this beat is the national trust bank, an uninsured national bank that limits its operations to those of a trust company and activities related thereto; Congress confirmed that authority in 1978 by amending what is now 12 USC 27(a), and the OCC reads it to cover fiduciary activities and non-fiduciary custody and safekeeping alike. The scale of that book is large and largely unremarked: the agency's own decision of 14 August 2026 records that OCC-supervised uninsured national trust banks reported $7.2 trillion in assets under administration as of 31 March 2026, $1.7 trillion of it in custody and safekeeping accounts and $5.5 trillion in fiduciary accounts. Since December 2025 the agency has granted preliminary conditional approval to a run of digital asset trust banks, and its own footnotes name them: BitGo Bank & Trust and First National Digital Currency Bank, both 12 December 2025, Fidelity Digital Assets and Paxos National Trust in the same batch, Ripple National Trust Bank on 12 December 2025, Bridge National Trust Bank on 12 February 2026 and Foris DAX National Trust Bank on 20 February 2026. Supervision of the resulting institutions sits in a Specialty Asset Supervisory Office with an Assistant Deputy Comptroller for National Trust Bank Supervision.