I. Management’s Discussion and Analysis
Resolutions and Receiverships
The FDIC has the unique mission of protecting depositors of insured banks and savings associations. No depositor has ever experienced a loss on the insured amount of his or her deposit in an FDIC-insured institution due to a failure. Once an institution is closed by its chartering authority—the state for state-chartered institutions, the OCC for national banks, and the OTS for federal savings associations—and the FDIC is appointed receiver, the FDIC is responsible for resolving the failed bank or savings association.
The FDIC employs a variety of business practices to resolve a failed institution. These business practices are typically associated with either the resolution process or the receivership process. Depending on the characteristics of the institution, the FDIC may recommend several of these practices to ensure the prompt and smooth payment of deposit insurance to insured depositors, to minimize the impact on the DIF, and to speed dividend payments to creditors of the failed institution.
The resolution process involves valuing a failing institution, marketing it, soliciting and accepting bids for the sale of the institution, determining which bid is least costly to the insurance fund, and working with the acquiring institution through the closing process.
In order to minimize disruption to the local community, the resolution process must be performed quickly and as smoothly as possible. There are three basic resolution methods: purchase and assumption transactions, deposit payoffs, and utilizing a Deposit Insurance National Bank (DINB).
The purchase and assumption (P&A) transaction is the most common resolution method used for failing institutions. In a P&A transaction, a healthy institution purchases certain assets and assumes certain liabilities of the failed institution. There are a variety of P&A transactions that can be used. Since each failing bank situation is different, P&A transactions provide flexibility to structure deals that result in the highest value for the failed institution.
Deposit payoffs are only executed if a bid for a P&A transaction does not meet the least-cost test or if no bids are received, in which case the FDIC, in its corporate capacity as deposit insurer, makes sure that the customers of the failed institution receive the full amount of their insured deposits.
The Banking Act of 1933 authorized the FDIC to establish a DINB to assume the insured deposits of a failed bank. A DINB is a new national bank with limited life and powers which allows failed bank customers a brief period of time to move their deposit account(s) to other insured institutions. A DINB allows for a failed bank to be liquidated in an orderly fashion, minimizing disruption to local communities and financial markets.
The receivership process involves performing the closing functions at the failed institution, liquidating any remaining failed institution assets, and distributing any proceeds of the liquidation to the FDIC and other creditors of the receivership. In its role as receiver, the FDIC has used a wide variety of strategies and tools to manage and sell retained assets. These include, but are not limited to: asset sale and/or management agreements, structured transactions, and securitizations.
Financial Institution Failures
During 2010, the FDIC experienced a significant increase in the number and size of institution failures, 157, as compared to previous years. For the institutions that failed, the FDIC successfully contacted all known qualified and interested bidders to market these institutions. The FDIC also made insured funds available to all depositors within one business day of the failure if it occurred on a Friday and within two business days if the failure occurred on any other day of the week. There were no losses on insured deposits, and no appropriated funds were required to pay insured deposits.
The following chart provides a comparison of
failure activity over the last three years.
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