FDIC BankFind MCP Server

fdic-mcp-server is an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server for the FDIC BankFind Suite API. It gives LLM hosts a clean way to search FDIC-insured institutions, retrieve public banking records, and run common multi-bank analysis workflows without custom FDIC API plumbing.

It is useful when you want an MCP-compatible client to answer questions about banks, failures, branches, quarterly financials, deposit data, or peer performance using a stable tool surface and machine-readable responses.

Table Of Contents

• Project Status

• Why This Project Exists

• Documentation

• Installation

• Usage

• Available Tools

• Data Notes

• Support

• Contributing

• License

Project Status

Active development. The server is usable today and the tool surface is covered by tests, but the project is still evolving as client support and analysis workflows improve.

Why This Project Exists

The FDIC BankFind Suite API is public and useful, but it is not packaged for MCP clients out of the box. This project solves that by:

• exposing BankFind datasets as MCP tools

• preserving both human-readable and machine-readable responses

• adding server-side analysis helpers for multi-bank comparison workflows

• supporting both local stdio hosts and remote HTTP hosts

Documentation

Public user docs:

• User’s Guide

Repo reference docs:

• Reference home

• Technical specification

• Architecture

• Key decisions

• Cloud Run deployment

• Plans and design notes

Project and release info:

• Release history

• Archived release notes

• Security policy

Installation

Prerequisites:

• Node.js 20 or later

• npm

Run directly without a global install:

npx fdic-mcp-server

Install globally:

npm install -g fdic-mcp-server
fdic-mcp-server

Install from GitHub Packages:

npm install -g @jflamb/fdic-mcp-server --registry=https://npm.pkg.github.com
fdic-mcp-server

Install from source:

git clone https://github.com/jflamb/fdic-mcp-server.git
cd fdic-mcp-server
npm install
npm run build

Usage

Hosted Endpoint

If your MCP host supports remote MCP URLs, use:

https://bankfind.jflamb.com/mcp

Run Locally

Stdio transport:

node dist/index.js

HTTP transport:

TRANSPORT=http PORT=3000 node dist/index.js

The HTTP MCP endpoint is http://127.0.0.1:3000/mcp by default.

Notes:

• Local HTTP runs bind to 127.0.0.1 by default. Set HOST if you intentionally want a different bind address.

• Browser-origin requests are checked against ALLOWED_ORIGINS. If unset, the server allows the local defaults for localhost and 127.0.0.1 on the configured port, plus non-browser requests with no Origin header.

• The HTTP transport is session-based. Clients initialize once, then reuse MCP-Session-Id on later POST, GET, and DELETE requests.

Container builds use PORT=8080 by default for Cloud Run compatibility.

Set FDIC_MAX_RESPONSE_BYTES to override the upstream FDIC response-size guard. The default is 5242880 bytes (5 MiB).

Minimal MCP Configuration

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fdic": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "fdic-mcp-server"]
    }
  }
}

If you are running from a local clone instead of the published package:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "fdic": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["/path/to/fdic-mcp-server/dist/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Client-specific setup details are in docs/clients.md.

Usage Examples

Find active banks in North Carolina with assets over $1 billion:

filters: STNAME:"North Carolina" AND ACTIVE:1 AND ASSET:[1000000 TO *]

Get the 10 costliest bank failures since January 1, 2000:

filters: FAILDATE:[2000-01-01 TO *]
sort_by: COST
sort_order: DESC
limit: 10

Compare North Carolina banks between two quarterly report dates:

state: North Carolina
start_repdte: 20211231
end_repdte: 20250630
sort_by: asset_growth
sort_order: DESC
(fdic_compare_bank_snapshots)

Build a peer group for a specific bank:

cert: 29846
repdte: 20241231
(fdic_peer_group_analysis)

More examples are in docs/usage-examples.md.

Available Tools

Two tools are server-side analysis helpers:

• fdic_compare_bank_snapshots batches roster lookup, financial snapshots, and optional demographics snapshots inside the MCP server

• fdic_peer_group_analysis builds a peer group from asset size, charter class, and geography criteria and then ranks an institution against peers

Data Notes

• Monetary values are generally reported in thousands of dollars.

• CERT is the stable FDIC institution identifier.

• Financial and demographics datasets are quarterly and use REPDTE in YYYYMMDD.

• Summary data is annual and uses YEAR.

• SOD data is annual branch-level data as of June 30.

• Do not mix quarterly financial data and annual branch data without stating the date basis.

Support

Use the GitHub issue tracker for bugs, documentation problems, and feature requests: https://github.com/jflamb/fdic-mcp-server/issues

The main support docs are:

• docs/support.md

• docs/prompting-guide.md

• docs/usage-examples.md

• docs/troubleshooting.md

• SECURITY.md

Contributing

Contributor guidance lives in CONTRIBUTING.md.

For local validation, run:

npm run typecheck
npm test
npm run build

Releases are published automatically from validated main commits by semantic-release. Do not manually edit the package version or create release tags by hand. GitHub Releases is the authoritative release record for published versions.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License.