U.S. Watchdog: Large U.S. Banks Can No Longer Deny Funding To Oil & Gas

Days before the end of the current Administration, a U.S. banking industry regulator finalized a rule under which large American banks cannot deny lending money to oil and gas companies. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released on Thursday its finalized rule to ensure the so-called fair access to banking services, under which “banks should conduct risk assessment of individual customers, rather than make broad-based decisions affecting whole categories or classes of customers, when provisioning access to services, capital,…