Summary:

In September 2023, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) is launching a new Banker Engagement Site (BES) through FDIC connect . BES provides a secure and efficient portal to exchange documents, information, and communications for consumer compliance and Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) examinations. Specifically, BES provides a financial institution’s authorized staff the ability to communicate with FDIC examination staff and to respond to the information and document requests made throughout the supervisory process.

Statement of Applicability: The contents of, and material referenced in, this FIL apply to all FDIC-supervised financial institutions.

Highlights:

The FDIC is introducing BES as the primary tool for exchanging examination planning and other information for Division of Depositor and Consumer Protection (DCP) consumer compliance and CRA activities.

BES offers new functionality to improve the banker experience in pre-examination process and improves efficiencies through the following features:

• The ability for bank users to collaborate with the FDIC’s examination team when responding to information and document requests;
• The capability to submit questions and comments to the examination team;
• The ability to view submitted responses and documents;
• The capability to associate responses with specific requests;
• The ability to manage the bank’s user roles and permissions;
• The availability of informative user guides and training resources;
• Contact information for the examination team;
• Access to the pre-examination planning response provided for the previous examination; and
• An ability to opt-out of using BES (institutions will be provided an alternative method to respond to pre-examination planning requests and to exchange information).

The FDIC’s existing tool to exchange examination information, the Enterprise File Exchange (EFX), will continue to be used when the pre-planning for consumer compliance and CRA activity initiated prior to the availability of BES and also may be utilized in some additional circumstances. The FDIC’s examination management will inform financial institutions, during their initial pre-examination contact, of the application that will be used for their examination during the transition to BES. BES is designed to support the consumer compliance examination process and is not planned for the use in other FDIC examinations, such as safety and soundness examinations. For such activities where BES is not used, institutions should continue to use EFX and reference FIL-63-2019 .

BES is integrated with the FDIC’s identity access system via FDIC connect for user authentication. External users must be registered with FDIC connect to benefit from the enhanced capability provided by BES. External users will continue to be authenticated using a secure two-factor authentication process.