The Trump administration has a strong message for the country’s bankers: You’re not the villain anymore.

President Donald Trump’s newly minted financial regulatory team—growing in size with recent confirmations—is sounding a friendlier tone than its predecessor, which restricted the industry following the 2008 bank bailouts.

“Changing the tenor of supervision will probably actually be the biggest part of what it is that I do,” said Randal Quarles, the Federal Reserve’s regulatory chief, in maiden public remarks last week before bankers in New York.

After the financial crisis, the credibility of financial firms took a big hit among regulators and lawmakers of both parties, leading to stricter rules for the industry and less influence over Washington’s decisions about how the firms ran their businesses.

Mr. Quarles and other new regulators have begun re-evaluating the resulting Wall Street rule book, but rewriting rules takes time. In the near term, one thing they can do is change the posture the government takes in day-to-day interactions with financial firms.


One day after Mr. Quarles’s remark, Keith Noreika, who since May has served as acting comptroller of the currency, criticized Obama-era officials for being too quick to impose harsh sanctions on banks viewed as not meeting the legal requirements to lend in poor communities.

“My kid—[if] I told her that she had to study for her science test, but she always failed, I don’t think she would study for her science test,” he said, explaining his approach. “The same goes for a bank: You want to incentivize them.”

Mr. Noreika could be replaced as soon as this week by Joseph Otting, a former banker who is Mr. Trump’s permanent nominee for the comptroller position. The Senate is expected to hold a final vote on Mr. Otting’s nomination in the coming days.

Keith Noreika, acting comptroller of the currency, spoke at a Senate hearing in Washington on June 22. Mr. Noreika has changed both policies and tone at the OCC while his successor, Joseph Otting, awaits Senate confirmation. Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News

Bankers have taken notice of the shift in tone. James Dimon, chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S. bank by assets, wrote in April that “it is an understatement to say improvements could be made. The regulatory environment is unnecessarily complex, costly and sometimes confusing.”


In October, after a Treasury Department report recommended rethinking rules that he and other bankers have criticized, Mr. Dimon said: “I think the Treasury did an exceptional job.”

“The amount of regulatory reform has been limited, but the way that people are thinking about and interpreting it is better,” Terry Dolan, chief financial officer of U.S. Bancorp, said in a recent interview.

Mr. Trump set a new tone from the start of his presidency. At a White House event with chief executives days after taking office, he pointed to Mr. Dimon and said “there is nobody better” to give him regulatory advice.

In the early years of the Obama administration, tensions between banks and the president were far higher. In a 2009 interview, Mr. Obama rebuked “fat cat bankers on Wall Street” who were “drawing down $10, $20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it’s gone through in—in decades.”


The two presidents also assembled different financial teams. Mr. Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, worked on Wall Street and ran OneWest Bank, now part of CIT Group Inc.

Among other Trump-appointed regulators, Mr. Quarles gave banks legal advice and invested in them, Mr. Noreika is a career banking lawyer and Mr. Otting is a longtime banker who worked alongside Mr. Mnuchin at OneWest.

By contrast, Mr. Obama’s comptroller, Thomas Curry, was a longtime bank regulator. His Fed regulatory chief, Daniel Tarullo, was a law professor. Treasury Secretaries Timothy Geithner and Jacob Lew spent much of their prior careers in government.

Thomas Curry, comptroller of the currency during the Obama administration, spoke at a conference in New York in October 2016. During their tenures, Mr. Curry and Mr. Tarullo reorganized their respective agencies, establishing Washington-based committees that review major supervisory decisions about the largest banks. Photo: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg News

Mr. Mnuchin’s banking experience helped him realize early on that a change in regulatory personnel could have an impact. In March, he promised a group of community bankers visiting the White House that the administration intended to help them by “changing the tone,” according to attendees.


To accomplish that goal, Trump-appointed officials may be able to rely on a system built by their predecessors.

The Fed and the comptroller’s office, known as the OCC, share supervision of the largest U.S. banks. Each has hundreds of bank supervisors stationed in regional branches across the country. These career employees don’t always agree with directions from Washington, no matter who is in charge.

After the financial crisis exposed flaws in bank oversight, both Mr. Tarullo and Mr. Curry reorganized their agencies, establishing Washington-based committees that review major supervisory decisions about the largest banks.

“The levers are there,” said Martin Pfinsgraff, a consultant who was previously in charge of large bank supervision at the OCC from 2013 to 2016. “It shouldn’t take multiple years if somebody chooses to alter priorities.”

Mr. Pfinsgraff said that even before Mr. Trump’s election, the OCC began looking for areas where its supervisors might be going overboard: “That pendulum was already starting to swing.”

Of the Trump-appointed banking regulators, Mr. Noreika was installed first, and he has changed both policies and tone at the OCC while Mr. Otting awaits Senate confirmation.

When Mr. Trump signed GOP-backed legislation rescinding a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule on financial-dispute arbitration, Mr. Noreika declared it “a new day in Washington, when policy makers are actually concerned about the consequences that regulations have on working Americans.”

Steve Steinour, chief executive of Huntington Bancshares Inc., said in a recent interview that he and leaders of other regional banks were impressed when they met with Mr. Noreika in recent months.

“He was quite open, very engaged, and very, very smart. So my impression is [that] he is doing a wonderful job in this bridge mode,” Mr. Steinour said.

Mr. Tarullo, who stepped down as a Fed governor earlier this year, spoke at an event at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., in April. Mr. Tarullo was a law professor before becoming the central bank’s regulatory chief. Photo: Ron Antonelli/Bloomberg News

Mr. Quarles’s predecessor, Mr. Tarullo, was unpopular with bankers who viewed his approach as heavy-handed. One of his first meetings with financial executives, in March 2009, left participants thinking “we have a problem,” according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mr. Quarles appears to be making a different first impression.

In previous years at the annual conference of The Clearing House Association, a banking trade group, “regulators were constantly telling [the industry] how many issues there were and what was negative about them,” said Greg Lyons, a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP.

At the group’s annual conference in New York earlier this month, however, Mr. Quarles expressed sympathy for bankers’ long-held complaints about annual stress tests, capital rules and other matters. He also ate lunch at a table with Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Brian Moynihan and sat in on a panel where economists, former regulators, and a banker discussed stress testing.

Greg Baer, president of the trade group, told the crowd about Mr. Quarles’s career as a banking lawyer, investor, and senior Treasury Department official.

“We are all extremely fortunate” to have Mr. Quarles in the Fed’s top regulatory post, he said.

Write to Ryan Tracy at ryan.tracy@wsj.com and Christina Rexrode at christina.rexrode@wsj.com