FDIC Bank Diligence MCP Server

Answer questions about US banks from the FDIC's public BankFind data — institution details, structural history, current status, closures and failures — live, for vetting a bank counterparty.

Four things this server gets right that a naive read gets wrong

Every one measured live against the source on 2026-07-30.

1. The source states its own rate limit, and it is one request per second

Every FDIC response carries x-ratelimit-limit: 1. During the pre-gate a burst of queries earned a real HTTP 429. This server paces at 1 request/second — five times slower than the other JSON servers in this family, because the source says so — and treats a 429 as a temporary failure that charges nothing.

A 429 is never an answer. "No such bank" is HTTP 200 with a total of 0, and that is different.

2. 12/31/9999 is a sentinel meaning "no end date", and it poisons a naive sort

Ask for the most recently closed institutions the obvious way — inactive, sorted by end date, descending — and the FDIC returns:

12/31/9999  Wells Fargo Trust Company, National Association
12/31/9999  Fiduciary Trust Company International
12/31/9999  Fidelity Management Trust Company

Three institutions that never closed, sitting at the top of a list of closures. 26 of the 23,581 inactive records carry the sentinel. Exclude it and the answer is right:

2026-07-17  Small Business Bank
2026-07-10  Kentland Federal Savings and Loan Association
2026-07-01  Zapata National Bank

This server excludes the sentinel at the query and converts it to null at the parser, so it cannot reach a sort, a comparison, or your screen as a real date.

3. Three date formats in one API

institutions   ESTYMD / INSDATE / ENDEFYMD   "01/01/1870"           MM/DD/YYYY
history        EFFDATE                       "1910-01-20T00:00:00"  ISO with a T
failures       FAILDATE                      "5/1/2026"             M/D/YYYY, unpadded

All three go through one parser that returns ISO or null, and never guesses.

4. An unknown field name is silently dropped — no error

Measured: fields=NAME,NOT_A_REAL_FIELD returns HTTP 200 and a row containing only NAME. A typo does not fail; it quietly returns an answer with a hole in it. So field lists here are fixed constants and the caller cannot choose them.

Tools

tool	what it answers
find_bank	Institutions matching a name, each with its FDIC certificate number
get_bank	Everything published about one institution — status, charter class, regulator, dates, assets, deposits, plus its failure record if it has one
get_bank_history	Structural history newest first: name changes, mergers, acquisitions, relocations
list_recent_failures	Failed institutions, with resolution type and estimated cost to the insurance fund
list_recent_closures	Institutions that ceased to exist — usually a merger, not a failure
explain_limits	What this server will and will not say, and the four traps above. Read before acting.

The FDIC certificate number is the identity. Names repeat, change and merge; the cert does not.

Scope

FDIC-insured US institutions only. Credit unions (NCUA-insured), uninsured entities, non-US banks other than insured US branches, and any supervisory or CAMELS rating are outside it — supervisory ratings are not public data.

All money figures are in thousands of US dollars, as the FDIC publishes them. A total of 1,852,239,000 means $1.852 trillion.

banks.data.fdic.gov/robots.txt is 404 — no rules on the API host — but the API states its own limit and this server obeys it.

This server reports what the FDIC publishes. It does not rate a bank, does not assess creditworthiness, and does not say a counterparty is safe.

Pricing

Event	Price
Server start (apify-actor-start)	$0.05, charged once per server run by the platform
Tool call (mcp-tool-call)	$0.05 flat per completed tool call

No other events. Memory is pinned to 1024 MB so the start fee is charged once — on this platform the start event bills once per gigabyte.

Errors and notices are not charged. A malformed certificate number, an empty name, or an FDIC read failure — including an HTTP 429 throttle — returns without billing.

A sourced "no such institution" IS charged, and so is a search that matches nothing — those are the answers to the questions asked.

If a tool call cannot be billed correctly, the call fails rather than serving free.