Federal and state banking regulators have been fighting for years over who has the right to regulate fintechs. The center of this battle has been a series of lawsuits brought against the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) by various state banking regulators, including the New York Department of Financial Services. These actions were initiated to prevent the OCC from issuing special purpose national bank charters to non-depository fintech companies and to uninsured deposit-taking fintechs, which would enable the OCC to supervise these fintechs.

After sitting on the sidelines silently watching this battle for five years, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced this April that it intends to begin using a "dormant" authority to conduct regulatory examinations of nonbank financial companies when they pose risks to consumers. This has created further confusion among fintechs over who will be supervising them.