LITTLE ROCK — The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has revised the number of depositors who had accounts in excess of $100,000 at ANB Financial, the Rogers bank that failed in May 2008.
A total of 297 customers had accounts at the now defunct bank that exceeded what was then the FDIC-insured limit of $100,000, Andrew Gray, a spokesman for the agency, said Thursday.
The total amount in excess of the $100,000 limit was $19.8 million, Gray said.
Those statistics are an update - and a major drop - from the FDIC’s original report about ANB Financial when it closed. The FDIC said then that 647 customers had $39.2 million in deposits that exceeded the FDIC insured limit.
The financial regulatory overhaul act that was signed into law Wednesday includes a provision that permanently set the FDIC’s maximum insurance coverage on accounts at $250,000. The act also made the maximum limit retroactive to Jan. 1, 2008.
The FDIC had raised the insured limit to $250,000 on Oct. 3, 2008, but it was not retroactive and was said to be a temporary measure. Passage of the financial regulatory act means that accounts at the six U.S. banks that failed between Jan. 1, 2008, and Oct. 3, 2008, including ANB, are now covered by the $250,000 limit.
Gray was asked why the revised number of ANB accounts over $100,000 was so much lower than the original number released by the agency. He said in an e-mail Thursday that the number of depositors exceeding the insurance limit “usually comes down significantly once we are able to get into the bank.”
Tim Yeager, an associate professor of finance at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, said Thursday that it makes sense that the estimate of accounts exceeding the insured limit would decline after the FDIC more closely studies the bank’s records.
“I’ve tried to figure out the deposit insurance rules and they really are extremely complex when you get down into the fine details,” Yeager said. “Sometimes it appears that a depositor has multiple accounts that are all insured under the same coverage. But when you look more closely, there is something different about the accounts that mean they are insured separately.”
For example, he said, a customer may have several accounts with a total of $400,000 that might at first seem to be in excess of the $100,000 limit. But in fact, at closer inspection, those accounts each have less than $100,000 and all are insured.
The FDIC began sending checks Thursday to the 297 customers who held the accounts to fully repay them for the amount of deposits between $100,000 and $250,000.
About one-third of that money already had been paid out by the agency after it sold some of ANB’s assets.
Thirty-one of the 297 customers had accounts that exceeded $250,000, Gray said. The amounts exceeding $250,000 will not be reimbursed.
Business, Pages 25 on 07/23/2010