The same regulator that stood with Colorado two years ago now argues the state can cap rates only on banks located inside its borders. The full appeals court will decide whether nationwide rate exportation, the legal engine behind most bank-fintech lending, holds or breaks.

_{Sources
1 Consumer Financial Services Law Monitor | FDIC Backs Industry in Colorado DIDMCA Opt-Out Fight
2 Consumer Finance Monitor | Plaintiffs Tell Tenth Circuit En Banc Court Opt-Out Law Cannot Reach Out-of-State Banks
3 AFSA | FDIC Withdraws From Colorado DIDMCA Case
4 ABA Banking Journal | FDIC, OCC Side With Plaintiffs in Colorado Rate-Cap Lawsuit
5 U.S. Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit | Panel Opinion, No. 24-1293 (PDF)
6 JD Supra / Orrick | Tenth Circuit Grants En Banc Review in DIDMCA Case
7 National Law Review | Tenth Circuit to Rehear Landmark DIDMCA Rate-Exportation Case
8 Venable | Colorado Passes Law to Curb Interest Rates
9 Colorado General Assembly | HB23-1229
10 Banking Dive | Colorado and Virginia Rate-Cap Legislation Would Impact Fintech Lending}

The FDIC filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Tenth Circuit's en banc rehearing, arguing that Colorado's opt-out can reach only loans made by banks located in Colorado.¹ The agency's position rests on ordinary usage. A bank makes a loan, a borrower receives one, so the place a loan is "made" is the place the lending bank performs its core lending functions. Read that way, an out-of-state state-chartered bank keeps the right to export its home-state rate into Colorado, and the fintech partner that originates against that charter keeps its national rate structure.

The reversal is the part operators should not skip. The FDIC supported Colorado at the trial court in 2024, then pulled that brief in February 2025.³ Its June brief puts the federal regulator that runs the exportation statute on the same side as the OCC, which filed for the plaintiffs in December 2025.⁴ When both prudential banking regulators tell a federal appeals court that the statute means rates can still be exported, that is a significant signal to the court. It does not bind the judges, but it shifts the persuasive balance toward the lenders.

Federal law lets a state-chartered bank charge its home-state interest rate to borrowers anywhere in the country, the same exportation right national banks have.⁵ A 1980 provision known as Section 525 lets a state opt out of that rule for "loans made in such State." Several states opted out when the law passed in 1980, but most later repealed theirs, leaving only Iowa and Puerto Rico with standing opt-outs until Colorado revived the provision.⁵ Colorado revived the provision with HB23-1229, signed in 2023, with the opt-out effective July 1, 2024.⁹ Colorado's consumer credit code caps consumer rates at roughly 36 percent APR on a tiered basis.⁸

The entire case turns on five words. The lenders read "loans made in such State" as loans made by banks located in the opting state, so Colorado can cap only Colorado-based banks. Colorado reads it as loans made to borrowers located in the state, so the cap reaches any loan to a Colorado resident regardless of where the bank sits.⁵ The first reading preserves nationwide exportation. The second reading lets every state build its own rate ceiling and apply it to outside banks. That is the whole fight.

Because rate exportation is the legal foundation under a large share of online and bank-partner lending. The panel opinion itself framed Colorado's law as a response to "rent-a-bank" arrangements, where a fintech originates loans through a partner bank so the bank is the lender of record and exports its rate past the borrower-state ceiling.⁵ If you run any program that depends on a bank charter to set the rate, this case decides whether that structure works the same way in every state or has to be rebuilt state by state.

Even operators who never touch a bank-partner model feel the second-order effect. MCA is structured as a purchase of future receivables rather than a loan, factoring buys invoices, and equipment finance secures hard assets, so the direct rate-cap mechanics differ by product. But a fractured exportation regime reprices risk across the whole non-bank funding market. Warehouse lenders, forward-flow buyers, and securitization desks all price paper partly on legal certainty. When the rule that governs whose rate is enforceable becomes a fifty-state question, the capital that funds your book gets more cautious about anything that looks rate-cap exposed.

If the en banc court restores the panel's borrower-location reading, any state can opt out and apply its own cap to loans made by out-of-state banks to its residents.⁵ A program that runs one national rate sheet through a partner bank would have to map rates to each opt-out state, exit some states, or restructure the product. Some state banks and their fintech partners already paused or reworked Colorado lending after the panel ruling, and legal coverage has flagged Virginia and other states moving on similar legislation.¹⁰

If the lenders' reading wins, exportation survives in its current shape and opt-outs reach only banks chartered inside the opting state, which in practice is almost no one. That is the outcome the FDIC, the OCC, and the plaintiffs are all now pushing for. The honest summary for operators is that the two outcomes are far apart, and the full court took the case precisely because the question is unsettled.

No, and that is the reason a single circuit case is worth your attention. Colorado is the test balloon. The National Law Review described the rehearing as a landmark on rate exportation, the kind of ruling other states read before they act.⁷ A decision that blesses the borrower-location reading would hand every consumer-advocacy-minded legislature a working template. A decision the other way would slow that movement and keep the exportation regime intact.

For a lender mapping its own exposure, the practical filter is simple. Identify which of your products rely on a partner bank's rate, which states you lend into, and which of those states have either passed or floated an opt-out. That map is the difference between watching this case as news and watching it as a direct input to your rate and licensing plan.

First, inventory your rate dependencies. Know exactly which loan programs price off a partner bank charter and which price off your own state licenses. The programs that depend on exportation are the ones exposed to this case, and you want that list before a decision lands, not after.

Second, pressure-test a state-by-state version of your rate structure. You do not have to build it, but you should know what it would take. If a ruling forced you to apply borrower-state caps in opt-out states, which products survive at those rates, which need repricing, and which you would pull. An operator who has already run that exercise can move in days. One who has not will spend a quarter figuring out the question.

Third, talk to your funding partners now. Warehouse lenders and forward-flow buyers are reading the same docket. Showing them that you understand which of your assets are exportation-dependent, and that you have a contingency for opt-out states, is the kind of preparation that keeps a line open when the legal picture gets noisy.

Watch three things. First, the en banc argument and decision in National Association of Industrial Bankers v. Weiser. The court vacated the panel opinion and reinstated the lenders' injunction in April, and the supplemental briefing the FDIC and plaintiffs just joined runs toward an argument the court has not yet publicly dated.⁶ Second, copycat legislation. Banking Dive has tracked other states weighing opt-out bills, and each new bill widens the surface area for any lender that exports rates.¹⁰

Third, the regulators. The FDIC reversed once already in this case, and an agency that withdrew a brief in February 2025 and refiled on the opposite side in June 2026 is telling you the federal posture on exportation is itself in motion.³ The court will decide the legal question. The regulators will decide how aggressively the answer gets enforced. Both inputs sit upstream of your rate sheet.

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Non-bank lenders are working to hold their place in the residential mortgage-backed securities market after the February 2026 collapse of UK bridging lender Market Financial Solutions, which carried a peak loan book of about 2.4 billion pounds amid allegations of fraud and double-pledged assets.^a MFS owner Paresh Raja has categorically denied any and all allegations of fraud or dishonesty. The fallout was real for funders: Barclays disclosed a 228 million pound loss and said it would constrain lending to certain structured-finance counterparties, while Jefferies flagged exposure on a 103 million pound warehouse facility.^a The operator signal is that warehouse providers are raising diligence on originator controls and double-pledge protection, and lenders with three to five years of clean public-program history face far easier renewals than newer issuers with six to twelve months of track record.

Crescent Capital Group closed its fourth U.S. direct lending fund on June 3 with 10.8 billion dollars of investable capital, the largest fundraise in the firm's history and more than double the 4.2 billion dollars its predecessor fund raised in February 2022.^b The fund drew commitments from more than 100 institutional investors, has already issued 2.7 billion dollars of senior loan commitments, and has deployed roughly 40 percent of its capital into lower-middle-market, sponsor-backed borrowers.^c The operator signal is competitive, not abstract: 10.8 billion dollars hunting lower-middle-market sponsor deals compresses spreads at that tier and pushes institutional capital to compete further down-market, into the larger end of the borrower range that equipment finance, asset-based, and bigger working-capital lenders already serve. Watch whether your funding partners start benchmarking your pricing against cheaper direct-lending money, and whether that dry powder begins chasing deals one tier below where it used to stop.

The CFPB issued a statement on June 5, applicable June 8, telling creditors that when they assess a consumer's ability to repay a mortgage or certain open-end credit, they may need to consider immigration status where potential removal from the United States could disrupt income.^d The bureau grounded the statement in the Truth in Lending Act and Regulation Z, and pointed to signals such as reliance on an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number.^e It reverses the posture of a 2023 CFPB and DOJ joint statement, withdrawn in January 2026, that had warned lenders against using immigration status under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act.^f For lenders serving immigrant-owned small businesses and ITIN borrowers, the compliance posture on status just moved in two directions at once, and the safe path is documented, income-based reasoning rather than status-based assumptions.