National Conference of State Legislatures Signals Support for SAFER Banking Act Ahead of Committee Markup

The National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) is announcing its support for the Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation (SAFER) Banking Act (S.2860) ahead of the legislation’s scheduled markup in the Senate Banking Committee this week.

The NCSL sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on behalf of states supporting the legislation, which aims to provide safe harbor for banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions and payment processors that provide services to state-licensed cannabis businesses.

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The NCSL is a bipartisan organization that serves the legislators and staffs of U.S. states, commonwealths and territories by providing research, technical assistance and opportunities for policymakers to exchange ideas on pressing state issues.

Signed by NCSL CEO Tim Storey, the Sept. 25 letter calls the SAFER Banking Act “a much-needed solution to reconciling the conflict between a burgeoning and legitimate state cannabis industry and its ability to comply with federal cannabis laws.”

“Our current system relies on cash-only cannabis transactions, increasing the real risk that these cannabis businesses become prime targets for theft, burglary, armed robbery and other property crimes that jeopardize the safety of the business owners and the communities in which they operate,” Storey wrote. “The bipartisan SAFER Banking Act will create a safe environment for cannabis businesses and would allow financial institutions to provide banking services to legitimate state authorized cannabis-related businesses.”

The Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act, the previous version of SAFER, has passed the U.S. House seven times, but Senate leadership was unwilling to take up the legislation with each passage.

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Now, under the new title of the SAFER Banking Act, the bill is calendared for a markup in the Senate Banking Committee at 9:30 a.m. Sept. 27, marking the first time that the upper chamber is taking the lead on the legislation.

While the nuts and bolts of the original proposal remain intact, the SAFER Banking Act includes eight additional pages that are almost exclusively related to Section 10 of the legislation, which largely addresses requirements for federal banking agencies to oversee financial institutions to ensure their services are only provided to good actors, both inside and outside of the cannabis industry.

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For Storey and the NCSL, the benefits of this kind of federal banking reform are clear.

“The inability of legal cannabis businesses to receive financial services from the federal banking system creates an unsafe and untenable position for these legal entities,” Storey wrote in his letter to the congressional leadership. “The SAFER Banking Act would provide much-needed banking resources to legitimate state businesses."