WASHINGTON— The Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are postponing next week’s National Interagency Community Reinvestment Conference due to growing health concerns about the coronavirus, the agencies said Thursday.
The biennial conference was scheduled to take place in Denver from March 9-12. It was to be co-hosted with Fed's regional banks in San Francisco, Kansas City and Chicago.
In a news release, the three agencies said they "jointly made this decision out of an abundance of caution to help safeguard the health and well-being of the more than 1,300 registered conference participants."
The organizers of the conference are working to secure a new date for the event “as soon as possible” later this year, the regulators said.
Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting and Esther George, the president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, were among the conference’s scheduled speakers.
The event was slated to feature updates on the Trump administration’s efforts to reform the Community Reinvestment Act, compliance training for banks and discussions on new community development trends and issues.
On March 3, the website for the conference posted a notice saying that the event would go on as scheduled despite mounting concern about the spread of COVID-19 in the United States. However, the notice asked conference attendees to adhere to a “no contact” policy and asked participants to avoid handshakes.
