Chapter 3
Financial Institutions and Services

Substantial capital runs on institutional plumbing. Commercial banks, credit unions, brokerage firms, asset managers, custodians, and insurers provide the liquidity, custody, and credit that everything else in this book assumes — and each is a counterparty whose failure modes, insurance limits, and fee structures are yours to know.

Oversight of these institutions is fragmented across overlapping functional regulators instead of consolidated under a single authority; knowing which agency owns which failure mode tells you where your protections—and your complaint—actually live. On the banking side:

• The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ( OCC) charters and supervises national banks and federal thrifts;
• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) ( fdic.gov) insures deposits and supervises state-chartered banks outside the Federal Reserve System;
• The Federal Reserve ( federalreserve.gov) conducts monetary policy and supervises bank holding companies and state member banks;
• The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA, ncua.gov) charters, insures, and supervises credit unions. Consumer conduct across banks and lenders—billing errors, electronic transfers, required disclosures—falls to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) ( consumerfinance.gov).

On the investment side:

• The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ( sec.gov) regulates securities markets, public issuers, registered funds, and investment advisers;
• The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) ( finra.org) is the self-regulatory body that licenses and polices broker-dealers.

Insurance, by contrast, is regulated almost entirely at the state level by individual insurance commissioners—there is no primary federal insurance regulator.