CDFI Fund to pause application submissions for 6 months

The Treasury’s Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI) Fund will pause acceptance of new CDFI certification applications and requests for Target Market modifications for six months, starting Oct. 1. According to the CDFI Fund, this pause will allow it to complete preparations needed to deploy the new certification application and reporting tools.

The CDFI Fund will resume accepting new CDFI Certification Application submissions and requests for Target Market modifications on April 3, 2023. The new CDFI Certification Application will be in effect at this time for those organizations applying for CDFI Certification.

Existing CDFIs will have a one-year grace period to comply with the new CDFI Certification criteria.

The CDFI Fund undertook an extensive review and comment period on its CDFI Certification requirements based on responses from the public in May 2020 in order to ensure that its policies and procedures continue to meet statutory and regulatory requirements while being responsive to the CDFI industry.

The CDFI Fund revised the CDFI Certification Application, as well as the Annual Certification and Data Collection Report (ACR) as part of this process, and introduced the collection of transactional level data from all Certified CDFIs.

The revised CDFI Certification Application ACR, and updated methods for collecting transactional level data from Certified CDFIs will be released for a second round of public comment in the coming weeks.