Axos Bank--More Sketchiness?
The Washington Post has a big piece up about Axos Bank being the lender-of-last-resort for Donald Trump. But those us who work in the consumer finance space, know of Axos as a notorious bank partner in rent-a-bank arrangements. Axos is the bank parter of World Business Lenders, an outfit that charges small businesses incredibly high rates of interest (268%!), deceptively disclosed as daily percentage rates rather than annual rates. And of course these loans are backed by personal guaranties from the owners, so they are in many ways like consumer loans.
Axos is a federal savings association, regulated primarily by the OCC, and headquartered in San Diego, California. So you'd think that Axos would only be able to export California interest rates, which would not in most circumstances allow for interest rates anywhere above 10% on business loans. But there's a set of OCC opinion letters from the 1990s that says that the relevant usury rate is the rate in the state in which the branch of the bank making the loan is located, not the location of the bank for chartering purposes. That's how Chase is an Ohio charter, but can charge Delaware rates. As for Axos, it claims that it makes its loans out of its Nevada branch, and Nevada law does not generally have a usury rate for written contracts, so Axos claims it can charge what it wants.
The OCC opinion letters are only about national banks, not federal savings associations, which is an opening for the OCC, if it cared to do something about this problem. Plus, even for national banks, the opinion letters are hardly ironclad legal reasoning and could readily be repealed without notice-and-comment rulemaking. In other words, the OCC could solve rent-a-bank tomorrow if it wanted to do so.
Putting aside the legal standard, the factual application of the OCC opinion letters to Axos seems sketchy. Axos's claim to be making the loans out of its Nevada branch, which is supposedly a "full service branch", but it's located on the 4th floor of a Vegas office park building that seems to generally be virtual offices and shared office space. (Does it remind anyone of the old trick of using a Westchester, NY, virtual office for getting bankruptcy venue in White Plains?) To be sure, there's an Axos sign on the building, but the 4th floor of an office park is a very strange place to locate a "full service branch"--it doesn't exactly invite walk-in business. Whether the loans are really being made out of the Nevada branch--meaning, I'd think, that the personnel involved in the underwriting are all in Vegas--is the sort of thing I would hope an OCC examiner would examine....
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