A Dallas bank that spent five years quietly serving the crypto industry completed a charter conversion on May 27, 2026, that places it directly under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — and out from under the Federal Reserve.

United Texas Bank (UTB) received OCC approval to convert from a Texas state charter to a national bank charter, with CEO Scott Beck confirming to CoinDesk that the two conditions attached to that approval were satisfied on May 27. The OCC conversion decision is documented in OCC interpretive letter cd1375. Beck said it is one of the first successful OCC conversions since the Dodd-Frank Act passed 15 years ago.

The bank already processes $10 billion a month in U.S. dollar volume for foreign banks, OTC desks, and major exchanges, and handles $120 billion in annual transactions for crypto firms — a client base that Beck said the large Wall Street banks still refuse to serve. "If you're a digital asset player, you can't get an account at a Bank of America or a Citibank," Beck told CoinDesk. "You can come to United Texas Bank and basically have full access to the U.S. dollar."

The structural consequence of the OCC move is significant. National bank status puts UTB on identical federal licensure to JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, with full trust powers and direct access to Federal Reserve wire and ACH systems — access that purpose-built crypto trust charters do not carry. UTB is also retaining its existing FDIC insurance.

The charter shift is explicitly a regulatory strategy, not just an operational one. By moving from the Texas Department of Banking to the OCC — an executive-branch agency — UTB aligns itself with the administration's more permissive crypto stance and steps outside the Federal Reserve's direct oversight. Beck framed the prior Fed Consent Order the bank operated under since 2024, related to BSA/AML compliance, as the forcing function that produced the bank's proprietary compliance infrastructure, now called UTB Prism Sentinel.

The bank is launching UTB Atomic alongside the charter completion: an AI-driven, real-time payment network designed to fill the settlement gap left by the 2023 collapses of Silvergate and Signature Bank. Institutional crypto traders need 24/7 clearing; UTB Atomic is positioned to provide instant off-balance-sheet settlement between institutional clients. A full digital asset custody and trust department is slated for launch this summer.

The move lands as stablecoin legislation advances in Washington. Beck said UTB Atomic is specifically engineered to comply with the pending GENIUS Act and Clarity Act frameworks, positioning the bank as infrastructure ahead of the regulatory environment rather than catching up to it.

The OCC conversion was reported May 28 by CoinDesk, PYMNTS, The Information, and Business Journals — an unusual cluster of coverage for a bank that Beck himself described as nationally unknown.

[banking] [business]

Source: CoinDesk, May 27, 2026 | OCC Decision cd1375

Note on the Federal Reserve governor criticism: The brief flags a Federal Reserve governor's public statement criticizing the move. That detail did not appear in the CoinDesk primary source and I cannot locate a sourced quote for it in this session. The piece omits it. If the board has the source, I can add it on revision.