President Donald Trump appointed National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) Vice Chairman Kyle Hauptman to become the 13th NCUA board chair.

Hauptman indicated he is against regulation by enforcement and is concerned with reducing compliance costs for covered institutions.

“I look forward to leading the agency’s dedicated professionals and working with my board colleagues to create a regulatory structure that promotes growth, opportunity, and innovation within the credit union system,” Hauptman said in a statement.

Hauptman listed a host of priorities for the agency under his leadership, including:

• Re-examining the current NCUA budgeting process.
• Tasking groups of NCUA employees with identifying achievable internal efficiencies to reduce unnecessary frictions in the agency’s operations.
• Promoting appropriate artificial intelligence (AI) use as a tool for enhancing productivity and better understanding why regulated entities use it.
• Focusing on true financial inclusion by removing barriers to de novo credit unions and removing the “pain points” that have led to consolidation in the credit union space.
• Codifying the NCUA’s procedures to protect Americans from regulation-by-enforcement.
• Making clear that credit unions and their members are best positioned to assess their communities’ climate risks.
• Reassessing NCUA policies, such as overdraft regulations, that may discourage credit unions from serving low-income areas.
• Right-sizing credit unions’ obligations where possible under the Bank Secrecy Act, including NCUA’s regulations surrounding suspicious activity reports.

Hauptman succeeded Todd Harper in the role of board chair. During a House Financial Services hearing in November last year, Harper told Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) he planned to remain on the NCUA board until his term expired in 2027, regardless of whether Trump replaced him as chair.

Trump nominated Harper to the NCUA in 2019. He was nominated to lead the board in June 2022 and received Senate approval soon after. During his stint as chair, the NCUA implemented stronger risk-based capital standards for complex credit unions and increased consumer protections for credit union members by enhancing the supervision of fair lending laws and problematic overdraft fee programs.

Harper’s policies on overdraft programs could come under heavy scrutiny with Hauptman in charge. He indicated he views certain overdraft regulations as being among the types of policies that dissuade credit unions from serving low-to-moderate-income communities.