On June 1, 2026, Chief Judge Virginia Kendall of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois issued a major follow-up opinion in Illinois Bankers Association v. Raoul that substantially alters the court’s February 2026 summary judgment decision regarding the Illinois Interchange Fee Prohibition Act (“IFPA”).

The new opinion was issued after the Seventh Circuit vacated the district court’s February ruling and remanded the case for reconsideration in light of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s April 2026 Interim Final Rule and Interim Final Order addressing the IFPA.

The court ultimately concluded that the OCC’s Interim Final Rule changes the preemption analysis and requires entry of a permanent injunction barring Illinois from enforcing the IFPA’s Interchange Fee Limitation against national banks, federal savings associations, out-of-state state banks governed by the Riegle-Neal Act, and payment card networks.

What Changed—and What Did Not

The most important takeaway is that almost all of the district court’s February 2026 opinion, Illinois Bankers Association v. Raoul, F.Supp.3d, 2026 WL 371196 (N.D. Ill. Feb. 10, 2026) remains intact.

Judge Kendall expressly stated that the court’s prior:

• Background discussion;
• Legal standard;
• Justiciability analysis;
• Analysis of the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Cantero v. Bank of America;
• Rulings concerning entities other than national banks, federal savings associations, and Riegle-Neal-covered out-of-state state banks; and
• Entire analysis of the IFPA’s Data Usage Limitation

“remain as laid out in the February 2026 ruling and are fully adopted here.”

As a result, the court’s February holdings regarding the Data Usage Limitation remain unchanged. The Data Usage Limitation continues to be preempted or otherwise invalid as applied to national banks, federal savings associations, federal credit unions, certain out-of-state banks, and various payment-system participants acting in support of those institutions.

The Court Did Not Repudiate Its Earlier Analysis

An important aspect of the new opinion is what the court did not do.

The court did not conclude that its February reasoning was wrong. Nor did it determine that the OCC’s Interim Final Order independently dictated the result.

Indeed, Judge Kendall was openly skeptical of the OCC’s Interim Final Order. The court questioned both the procedural basis for the Order and the persuasiveness of its substantive analysis. The opinion suggests that the Order may be entitled only to Skidmore deference and repeatedly notes concerns about the OCC’s use of emergency procedures and its compliance with Dodd-Frank’s preemption requirements.

The court ultimately concluded that the Interim Final Order added little to the analysis and did not independently resolve the preemption question.

The Critical Change: The OCC Rewrote Section 7.4002

The real development was the OCC’s Interim Final Rule amending 12 C.F.R. § 7.4002.

In its February decision, the district court emphasized that interchange fees are not actually set by national banks. Rather, the fees are established by payment card networks such as Visa and Mastercard. Because the existing OCC regulation focused on fees established by banks themselves, the court concluded that the IFPA did not significantly interfere with a national bank power protected by federal law.

The OCC’s Interim Final Rule was specifically designed to address that reasoning.

The amended regulation now expressly provides that a national bank may obtain fees “directly or indirectly, through intermediaries, partners, payment networks, interchanges, or other third parties.” It further provides that fee decisions remain national-bank business decisions even when fees are set by or in consultation with third parties.

Judge Kendall acknowledged that the OCC’s amendment directly addressed the concern that had driven the February decision. The court wrote that while it previously found that Section 7.4002 did not protect fees established by third-party networks, “that is very clearly what the new iteration of the rule sets out to do.”

How the Court’s Reasoning Changed

The court’s ultimate conclusions changed only because the legal landscape changed.

In February, the court reasoned that the IFPA regulated a fee structure established by Visa and Mastercard rather than by national banks themselves. As a result, the court found insufficient interference with national-bank powers to satisfy the Barnett Bank standard incorporated into Dodd-Frank and reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in Cantero.

After the OCC amended Section 7.4002, however, the court concluded that federal law now expressly recognizes a national bank power to receive interchange fees through third-party payment networks and similar arrangements.

Once that power was recognized in the regulation, the court concluded that the IFPA became an obstacle to the exercise of that federally authorized power. In the court’s words, “in a world where the national banks’ powers will include the discretion to have third parties set their fees for them, it is difficult to see how the IFPA is not an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of that power.”

Accordingly, the court held that the IFPA now significantly interferes with the exercise of national-bank powers and is therefore preempted as applied to national banks, federal savings associations, and covered out-of-state state banks.

Payment Card Networks Also Benefit From the Injunction

Perhaps equally significant, the court concluded that effective relief could not be provided without extending the injunction to payment card networks.

Although the court continued to reject broader arguments that payment card networks independently enjoy national-bank preemption, it found that enjoining only the banks would be insufficient because the IFPA directly regulates the networks’ collection of interchange fees.

As a result, the permanent injunction also protects payment card networks from enforcement of the Interchange Fee Limitation to the extent necessary to effectuate the preemption ruling.

What Remains Unchanged

The court emphasized that the OCC’s actions did not alter several earlier conclusions.

Most notably:

• The court’s analysis of the Data Usage Limitation remains unchanged.
• The court’s earlier refusal to extend Interchange Fee Limitation preemption to federal credit unions remains unchanged.
• The court’s prior rulings regarding savings associations and savings banks chartered by states other than Illinois remain unchanged.
• The court continued to reject the proposition that the OCC’s Interim Final Order itself automatically resolved the litigation.

Looking Ahead

The litigation is far from over.

The district court repeatedly highlighted potential vulnerabilities in the OCC’s actions, including questions concerning compliance with Dodd-Frank’s procedural requirements, the agency’s reliance on emergency rulemaking procedures, and whether the Interim Final Order was properly issued by an official other than the Comptroller himself.

Those issues were not directly before the court because the OCC is not a party to the case and no Administrative Procedure Act challenge to the OCC’s actions was pending.

For now, however, the practical result is clear. The district court has shifted from its February position and now holds that the IFPA’s Interchange Fee Limitation is preempted as applied to national banks, federal savings associations, certain out-of-state banks, and payment card networks because the OCC’s amended regulation has redefined the scope of the national-bank power protected by federal law.

The case now returns to the Seventh Circuit, where both the validity of the OCC’s actions and the district court’s revised preemption analysis are likely to receive close scrutiny.