By Ryan Tracy And Victoria McGrane 

Twelve of the largest U.S. banks are trying yet again to persuade regulators they can safely navigate bankruptcy without tanking the broader financial system.

Summaries of "living wills" from firms including J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. were published Monday on the websites of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The stakes are high: If the plans don't please regulators, firms could be forced to break up or shrink.

Among the new details: Banks have rethought how they would run a bankruptcy process, emerging significantly smaller than their current size or, in the case of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, ceasing to exist after selling themselves off in pieces.

Bankers and lawyers who worked on the plans said this year's versions--the fourth time most of the firms have filed--should address regulators' concerns. The wills were mandated by the Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul to ensure that any failure wouldn't set off the kind of catastrophe that accompanied the collapse of Lehman Bros. in 2008.

Last year, the Fed and FDIC found most plans flawed. They ordered the firms to start fixing the problems or face sanctions such as higher capital requirements or forced divestitures.

"The firms have taken meaningful, concrete steps to ensure their plans are credible and that no firm is too big to fail," said Rob Nichols, president of the Financial Services Forum, a trade group that represents big banks.

Firms whose bankruptcy playbooks were published Monday include Bank of America Corp., Bank of New York Mellon Corp., Citigroup Inc., Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, State Street Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., and the U.S. units of Barclays PLC, UBS AG, Credit Suisse Group AG, and Deutsche Bank AG. Last year, regulators said only Wells Fargo's plan was realistic.

The Fed and FDIC said on Monday they would begin reviewing the new plans. The agencies hope to provide feedback by the end of this year, according to people familiar with the matter. Last August they criticized banks for assuming they could sell business units and find sources of capital to remain afloat.

Almost all big U.S. banks said they would adopt a so-called "single point of entry" bankruptcy strategy, a change from many previous plans. Under the scenario, a bank's parent company and perhaps a few subsidiaries would enter bankruptcy, while the firm's units would be recapitalized with resources from the parent and remain open while they were sold, wound down or reorganized.

J.P. Morgan, for instance, said that under bankruptcy it would expect its national bank unit to shrink by one-third of its current size and its broker-dealer to shrink by two-thirds. The bank also said it continues to merge and eliminate legal entities.

Bank of America said in a worst-case scenario it would wind down and sell its global markets business, which focuses on sales and trading, and shrink its global banking business, which caters to corporate customers. The smaller Bank of America would focus on consumer banking and wealth management.

The bank also said it was already taking steps to make its units less interconnected, including separating its broker-dealer activities into two legal entities, one focused on retail customers and one focused on wholesale customers, such as pension and hedge funds.

Citigroup said under a wind down it expected its market businesses, operating through the broker-dealer entities, would be discontinued. The global corporate banking operations could be sold, and the U.S. retail banking operations could be spun off as their own public company. Information-technology employees would be stationed in branches or less-risky units.

Working together, the banks have completed one major item from the must-do list the Fed and FDIC issued last August, which many firms touted in their new plans: Eighteen global banks agreed to change derivatives contracts in a manner designed to prevent counterparties from terminating the contracts en masse once a bank goes into crisis, as occurred when Lehman Brothers failed in 2008.

Under orders by regulators to put more detail in the public sections of the living wills, the banks submitted longer documents this year. Citigroup's plan this year measured 102 pages, while last year's was 31 pages.

Private versions of the documents, by contrast, are usually thousands of pages long, leading regulatory staff to use word-search functions in their computer software as they comb the digital files.

Justin Baer, Christina Rexrode and Emily Glazer contributed to this article

Write to Ryan Tracy at ryan.tracy@wsj.com and Victoria McGrane at victoria.mcgrane@wsj.com

Access Investor Kit for The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.

Visit http://www.companyspotlight.com/partner?cp_code=P479&isin=US38141G1040

Access Investor Kit for JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Visit http://www.companyspotlight.com/partner?cp_code=P479&isin=US46625H1005

JP Morgan Chase (NYSE:JPM)
Historical Stock Chart
From Feb 2024 to Mar 2024 Click Here for more JP Morgan Chase Charts.
JP Morgan Chase (NYSE:JPM)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2023 to Mar 2024 Click Here for more JP Morgan Chase Charts.