Sen. Phil Gramm, chairman of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, was among the Senate and House conferees who reached a compromise early Friday morning on details of financial services modernization, including the Community Reinvestment Act.

By vote of the conferees, the compromise will be part of the Gramm-Leach Act. Details of the compromise will be available Friday afternoon.

Gramm made the following statement after the compromise was reached:

"The financial services modernization legislation is the most important banking legislation in 60 years. The people it will benefit most are working families. It is legislation that we can be proud of, and it will become law because it will pass both houses of Congress by large margins and will be signed by the President.

"The hallmark of the bill is that it will make an array of financial services available to every American consumer that will provide lower prices and one-stop shopping at financial supermarkets in every city and town in the country.

"The bill has very strong Community Reinvestment Act reforms. For the first time, payments of vast sums of money that flow under the requirement of CRA agreements will be made public, and those who receive the money will have to file an annual report on how they are spending that money in the public interest. This will promote real accountability and assure that the money is used to benefit the working families that it is supposed to help.

"The legislation also grants major regulatory relief to every small bank in America. More than 82 percent will receive a dramatic reduction of the regulatory burden from CRA audits.

"Finally, we met the legitimate privacy needs of Americans by guaranteeing that every bank must tell every customer what its privacy policy is, by assuring that every customer can opt out by changing to another bank if they don't like how they are treated, and by requiring that any bank which is considering use of our private information outside the institution give us an absolute right to simply say no. This is the strongest privacy policy provided in American history, but also one that will not destroy the information age before it begins."