MetLife Wins Fed Extension Until January 5 for Capital Plan

Oct. 1 (Bloomberg) -- MetLife Inc., the insurer seeking an exit from banking to limit U.S. oversight, said it won an extension for submitting its capital plan to the Federal Reserve as the company seeks regulatory approval for a deal to sell deposits to General Electric Co. (GE)

The deadline was moved to Jan. 5 from Sept. 30, according to a regulatory filing today from New York-based MetLife, the largest U.S. life insurer.

The extension is the second granted to Chief Executive Officer Steven Kandarian after he was unable to get out of banking as quickly as he planned. The Fed, which regulates the largest banks and previously rejected Kandarian’s proposal to resume share buybacks, had initially sought a new capital plan by June, before it set the Sept. 30 date.

“We continue to believe the Federal Reserve has little interest in regulating MET as a bank holding company,” Sterne Agee & Leach Inc. analysts led by John Nadel said in a Sept. 24 note. “Why otherwise would the Fed have granted MET the original refilling extension?”

MetLife said Sept. 21 that it changed the GE deal so that it would require approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency rather than the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

To contact the reporter on this story: Zachary Tracer in New York at ztracer1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dan Kraut at dkraut2@bloomberg.net