They rescinded one document. The Interagency Statement on Special Purpose Credit Programs, dated February 22, 2022, told creditors that a program aimed at "the credit needs of specified classes of persons" was permissible.¹ That statement is now withdrawn, effective August 25, 2026, published at 91 FR 54875 under Docket FR-6606-N-01.^{1 8} The signature that matters is the seventh: Harmeet K. Dhillon, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, signing for the Department of Justice alongside the six prudential and housing regulators.¹ The Federal Reserve is not among them. It withdrew its own CA Letter 22-2 four days earlier, on August 21, saying it acted because other agencies had rescinded the guidance it referenced and because the underlying regulation had changed.⁷

No, and any vendor who tells you otherwise this week is selling something. A rescission removes assurance. It does not amend a regulation. The thing that amended the regulation was the CFPB's final rule at 91 FR 21620, published April 22 and effective July 21, 2026.² If your program was still compliant on July 22, nothing in today's notice changed its legality. What changed is that the last document you could point an examiner, a partner bank, or a plaintiff's lawyer toward is gone.

Answer this before you spend counsel hours, because for much of this readership it is dispositive. Regulation B reaches commercial files: it defines business credit as "extensions of credit primarily for business or commercial (including agricultural) purposes," and section 1002.8 sits in the same part.⁵ But the part before that is the threshold. Regulation B applies to credit, which it defines as "the right granted by a creditor to an applicant to defer payment of a debt, incur debt and defer its payment, or purchase property or services and defer payment therefor."⁵ A true merchant cash advance is a purchase of future receivables, and a true factoring facility is a purchase of accounts. Both carry a live argument that they are not extensions of credit and therefore sit outside ECOA and Regulation B entirely, which would put today's notice outside your perimeter rather than inside it. Equipment finance, term paper, lines of credit, and revenue-based facilities papered as loans are plainly in scope and do not get that argument.

Two cautions before filing this under not-my-problem. The characterization is not a label you pick per question: if your documents make you a purchaser of receivables here, that is the position you have to hold when a state court asks whether the advance was a disguised loan. If you have argued the other way anywhere, the exemption is thinner than it looks. And the population sitting on the wrong side of an unresolved characterization question is not small. The Federal Reserve's 2025 Small Business Credit Survey, drawn from 6,525 employer firms, found 38 percent applied for a loan, line of credit, or merchant cash advance in the prior year, with the share applying at online fintech lenders up from 17 percent in the 2020 survey to 29 percent in the 2025 survey.¹¹ Worth stating the limit plainly: neither the notice nor the trade coverage mentions small business, merchant advances, factoring, or equipment finance even once.^{1 9} The exposure comes from the scope provision, not from anyone in Washington saying your name. We worked the business-credit question through in more depth on August 8.¹⁷

The amended rule draws a line that used to be invisible. New 12 CFR 1002.8(b)(3) says a for-profit program "shall not use the race, color, national origin, or sex, or any combination thereof, of the applicant, as a common characteristic or factor in determining eligibility for the program."³ That is a design ban, not a documentation burden. Eligibility keyed to anything that is not a prohibited basis is untouched: census tract, credit-file thinness, revenue band, industry, age of the business. The reference design here is Chase's small-business program, announced nationwide in November 2022 with loans up to $500,000, whose eligibility the bank described as geography-based, applying to businesses located in majority Black, Hispanic and Latino neighborhoods with no separate application step.¹⁰ A neighborhood test is not an applicant-characteristic test. We make no claim about whether that program is running today, only about how it was built.

More than it did, and you are the one proving it. Amended 1002.8(a)(3)(i) still requires a written plan that identifies the class, sets out procedures and standards, provides evidence of need, and explains why that class would not get the credit under your own standards of creditworthiness without the program.³ The new subparagraph (E) adds two explanations most existing plans do not contain: why the special social need "Necessitates that its participants share the specific common characteristics," and why it "Cannot be accomplished through a program that does not use otherwise prohibited bases as participant eligibility criteria."³ Then there is 1002.8(b)(4), which is the sharpest edge in the package. Where a for-profit program uses any other otherwise-prohibited basis, the lender must produce evidence "for each participant who receives credit through the program that in the absence of the program the participant would not receive such credit as a result of those specific characteristics."³ Read that as a file-level evidentiary standard rather than a program-level one. If your program approves 400 accounts a year, that is 400 records, not one memo.

The relief and the restriction shipped together, and only the restriction just lost its last supporting document. The same April rule rewrote 12 CFR 1002.6(a) to say "The Act does not provide that the 'effects test' applies for determining whether there is discrimination in violation of the Act," and narrowed the discouragement standard at 1002.4(b) to statements a creditor "knows or should know" would deter a reasonable applicant.^{4 2} Disparate impact is out of Regulation B. A lender whose scorecard produced uneven outcomes with no intent to discriminate is in a materially different federal posture than on July 20, and we covered what that means for automated underwriting on August 8.¹⁷

Now the part that gets undersold. Lowering the federal floor does not lower the ceiling, it moves the pressure. State fair-lending and unfair-practices statutes never adopted the CFPB's reading of ECOA, and state enforcers have already built the machinery: New Jersey's Division on Civil Rights published guidance in January 2025 treating automated decision-making tools that produce "disparate impact discrimination" as reachable under the state Law Against Discrimination, with credit named among the covered areas.¹⁸ For a multistate shop the filter is where your borrowers sit, not where you sit, and the state commercial financing disclosure regimes you already comply with did not move today either. Federal Regulation B got narrower. Your state exposure and your contracts did not.

Four things, in order. Inventory every program with non-standard eligibility, including the ones that were never papered as special purpose credit programs and exist only as a marketing page or a broker incentive. Test each one against 1002.8(b)(3) first, because a design failure cannot be documented away. For anything that survives, rebuild the written plan against the amended (a)(3)(i)(E) language and decide whether you can actually produce per-participant evidence under (b)(4), because if you cannot, the honest answer is to move eligibility to a non-prohibited basis. Then search your loan documents, partner agreements, and investor reporting for the phrase "Interagency Statement," because any covenant that incorporates a document rescinded this morning needs a conversation before your counterparty finds it first.

The record you pulled in March is not always the record sitting on the state site today. If your file holds a typed status and nothing else, you have a note rather than evidence.

This video shows how Cobalt returns a timestamped screenshot of the state record alongside the data, and how callback URLs let your team keep processing applications while a slow state site finishes responding.

Cobalt's Secretary of State API covers all 50 states plus DC, returns official-source data with normalized fields and request IDs, and can return a screenshot URL when you ask for one, so the file preserves what you saw at the point of decision.

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Trustar Bank is buying three Forbright locations, two in Maryland and a customer service hub in McLean, Virginia, along with roughly $750 million of deposits for about a $19 million premium, with a close expected in the fourth quarter.¹³ Forbright keeps its Chevy Chase headquarters and its national digital banking, middle-market commercial lending, and advisory businesses, with founder John Delaney saying the national businesses "have reached the scale and momentum that allow us to focus our capital, technology, and management attention where our competitive advantages are strongest."¹³ Trustar, at $1.14 billion in assets and founded in 2019 as the region's first de novo bank since 2008, is paying roughly 2.5 percent for local funding.¹³ Read it as a price quote: that is what sticky retail deposits cost right now, and what a specialty lender thinks they are worth giving up.

On August 19 the Seventh Circuit certified two questions to the Indiana Supreme Court and stayed the appeal, in a dispute over whether Merchants Bank of Indiana can foreclose on mortgaged properties while separately suing the guarantors on the same debt.¹⁴ The certified questions are whether Indiana Code 32-30-10-10 prohibits foreclosing "while simultaneously, in a separate proceeding, suing on guaranties securing the mortgage," and if so, whether guarantors may waive that protection.¹⁴ The district court had found the guarantors did waive it but held the waiver unenforceable on public policy grounds, and the panel called the statute ambiguous rather than deciding it.^{14 15} Nothing is decided. If you hold guaranties in a one-action state, the live question is whether your election-of-remedies waiver is worth the paper it is on.

Castlelake priced its debut residential transition loan securitization on August 20, a $261.3 million deal backed by 327 loans with a $223.0 million unpaid principal balance across 23 states, with original terms of 12 to 24 months.¹⁶ Morningstar DBRS rated four classes, led by $213.4 million of Class A1 at A (low) with a 5.682 percent coupon and 22.40 percent credit enhancement, and Castlelake retained $13.75 million of unrated notes as a 5 percent horizontal residual.¹⁶ The structural detail worth copying is the 24-month revolving period, with eligibility covenants of a 730 minimum weighted-average FICO and 75 percent caps on loan-to-as-is value and loan-to-cost, against a pool that actually printed at 742 FICO, 63.9 percent loan-to-as-repaired, and 60.8 percent loan-to-cost.¹⁶ That gap between the covenant and the print is the cushion buyers are demanding on short-duration business-purpose paper.

_{Sources
1 Federal Register | Interagency Rescission of the Interagency Statement on Special Purpose Credit Programs, 91 FR 54875
2 Federal Register | Equal Credit Opportunity Act (Regulation B) final rule, 91 FR 21620
3 eCFR | 12 CFR 1002.8, Special purpose credit programs
4 eCFR | 12 CFR 1002.6, Rules concerning evaluation of applications
5 eCFR | 12 CFR 1002.2, Definitions, including credit and business credit
6 Federal Register | CFPB rescission of the 2020 SPCP advisory opinion, 91 FR 36518
7 Federal Reserve | CA 22-2 withdrawal notice
8 GovInfo | Federal Register PDF as filed, FR Doc 2026-17307
9 ABA Banking Journal | Federal agencies rescind guidance on special-purpose credit programs
10 JPMorgan Chase | Chase takes nationwide action through a Special Purpose Credit Program
11 Federal Reserve | 2026 Report on Employer Firms, 2025 Small Business Credit Survey
12 Bloomberg Tax | Trump to Pull Guidance for Boosting Loans to Underserved Groups
13 Banking Dive | Virginia lender to acquire Forbright's DC-area branches
14 US Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit | Merchants Bank of Indiana v. Craik, Nos. 25-1798 and 25-1799
15 Mortgage Professional America | Indiana lender's twin-track loan collection lands before state supreme court
16 Castlelake | Castlelake Prices $261.3M Residential Transition Loan Securitization
17 Beyond Banks | Massachusetts Took $2.5M Over AI Underwriting, Using a Theory Federal Law Dropped on July 21 (August 8, 2026)
18 New Jersey Office of the Attorney General | Guidance on Algorithmic Discrimination and the NJ Law Against Discrimination (January 9, 2025)}