Rain Files OCC Bid to Charter National Trust Bank for Stablecoin Business

Rain, a stablecoin payments infrastructure company, has applied to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish Rain National Trust Bank, a national trust bank headquartered in New York. The company announced the filing on Oct. 5, saying approval would bring the custody, reserve management and stablecoin issuance behind its partners' programs under one federal supervisor.

If chartered, the bank would serve institutional clients across three lines of business: fiduciary custody of approved digital and fiat assets, reserve management for permitted stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act, and issuance and redemption of dollar-backed stablecoins. Client assets would sit apart from the bank's own assets, and the reserves backing any coin it issues would not be pledged, lent or reused, according to the announcement.

"The institutions building on Rain want the assets behind their programs held by a fiduciary that answers to a federal regulator," CEO and co-founder Farooq Malik said in the statement. "Rain National Trust Bank is how we plan to meet that expectation."

The proposed bank would be uninsured and limited in scope. It would not accept deposits, offer consumer accounts or make commercial loans. Rain itself would stay a stablecoin payments platform and a Visa and Mastercard principal member through its other subsidiaries, while the trust bank would operate as a separately capitalized subsidiary examined by the OCC, the company said.

Brandon Soto would serve as the bank's president and CEO, subject to OCC review. Soto was most recently executive vice president and CFO of Coastal Financial Corporation, and before that CFO of Square Financial Services, the Utah-chartered industrial bank owned by Block, where he helped prepare the charter application approved by the FDIC and Utah regulators and led finance, treasury and capital management. He earlier served as CFO and chief administrative officer of Green Dot Bank and is a CPA.

"A trust bank's first job is simple. Know what you hold, know who you hold it for, and keep it safe," Soto said in the statement. "I have sat across from bank examiners for twenty years, and the best answer you can give is, 'Here's the reconciliation.'"

Rain's partners run stablecoin card, wallet and money-movement programs reaching millions of end users. Today the assets behind those programs sit across state licenses, third-party custodians and third-party stablecoin issuers, and the company says a national trust bank would give those partners a federally supervised place to hold them. Crypto Briefing reported that the filing would move those functions under a single federal supervisory setup, with client assets kept apart from the bank's own books.

The application now faces OCC review, including a public comment period, with the public portion available on the OCC's website. Rain worked with the law firm Paul Hastings in preparing it, according to the announcement.

The filing landed days after community banks challenged the charter path itself. On Friday, the Independent Community Bankers of America sued the OCC in federal court in Washington, arguing the regulator exceeded its powers by letting non-depository trust banks conduct wide non-fiduciary business under lightly supervised charters, Cointelegraph reported. The group named the OCC and Comptroller Jonathan Gould as defendants and asked the court to throw out a March 2026 chartering rule and a 2021 interpretive letter, and to block further approvals built on them.

According to the complaint, the OCC has approved or conditionally approved at least 21 trust banks, with at least 13 of them crypto companies, that coverage notes. The Crypto Council for Innovation called the suit an attempt to stifle innovation. Rain is not alone in its timing: payments infrastructure company Modern Treasury also announced Monday that it had submitted a trust-bank application aimed at digital-asset custody and related fiat services.