Chartering & Structure

Entry, exit, charter flipping, and the division of the banking system across the three federal supervisors.

The structure of American banking changes through three margins. Banks enter with new charters and exit through closure or merger. Existing banks flip between charters, replacing one primary federal supervisor with another. And the balance of assets across the three agencies shifts as the banks they supervise grow, shrink, and consolidate. The panels below measure all three.

Unit	State × quarter (entry/exit); bank × year (conversions, structure)
Coverage	Entry and exit 1934–present; conversions and assets by agency 1988–2024
Source	FDIC institution records and annual Summary of Deposits

Entry and exit

Figure 1. New charters and closures per year since 1934. The industry has recorded net exit in nearly every year since the mid-1980s; entry effectively stopped after 2009.

Charter flipping

Switching supervisors is rare but persistent, and its direction is informative. Since 1988, banks have switched primary federal supervisor about 3,200 times. Flipping ran at 100 to 150 banks a year through the 1990s and has fallen by roughly two-thirds since. The spike in 2012 is not voluntary flipping: it is the Dodd-Frank Act's transfer of former thrift institutions after the Office of Thrift Supervision was abolished.

Figure 2. Banks switching primary federal supervisor per year, by destination agency, 1988–2024. The 2012 spike reflects the statutory transfer of former OTS thrifts.

Assets by agency

Figure 3. Share of insured-bank assets by primary federal supervisor, 1988–2024. The OCC supervises roughly two-thirds of banking assets while chartering a minority of banks; the FDIC supervises the most banks with less than a fifth of assets.

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Data: entry and exit, national (Parquet) · by state (Parquet) · conversions (Parquet) · assets by agency (Parquet)

Current state

The quarterly brief reports the latest chartering activity alongside the attention and alignment series.