CFPB, Federal Agencies, State Agencies, and Attorneys General
The CFPB is rescinding its existing enforcement and supervision priority documents, according to a memo sent to bureau staff by CFPB Chief Legal Officer Mark Paoletta.
The CFPB will focus its enforcement and supervision resources on pressing threats to consumers, particularly servicemembers, their families, as well as veterans, Paoletta wrote, in a memo to bureau employees.… Continue Reading
Saying that the bureau under the Biden Administration abused its power, the CFPB is seeking to reverse its settlement with Townstone Financial.
“CFPB abused its power, used radical ‘equity’ arguments to tag Townstone as racist with zero evidence, and spent years persecuting and extorting them – all to further the goal of mandating DEI in lending via their regulation by enforcement tactics,” said CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought.… Continue Reading
The Trump Administration’s efforts to “effectively shutter the CFPB” amounts to a “total dereliction of all mandatory statutory duties,” that will harm state consumer protection efforts, Democratic state attorneys general have told a Washington, D.C. federal judge.
“The CFPB has, to date, been an invaluable partner to many States in performing a variety of consumer-protection functions mandated by Congress,” the 23 state officials said, in an amicus brief in a suit filed by the National Treasury Employees Union.… Continue Reading
Earlier today Jonathan McKernan, President Trump’s nominee to head the CFPB, pledged that the agency would “implement and enforce the federal consumer financial laws and perform each of its other statutorily assigned functions.”
The comment, made during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, came in stark contrast to the Trump Administration’s previous statements that it intends to take the actions necessary to dismantle the CFPB.… Continue Reading
Acting CFPB Director Russell Vought has temporarily put a halt to virtually all of the agency’s work.
President Trump designated Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as acting bureau director Friday night. He replaced Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who had served as acting CFPB director until Vought’s appointment.… Continue Reading
On January 30, 2025, the CFPB ordered Wise, an international remittance company, to pay almost $2.5 million in connection with allegations of illegal activities, including advertising inaccurate fees and failing to properly disclose exchange rates and other costs.
Pursuant to the consent order, Wise must pay approximately $450,000 in redress to harmed consumers and pay a $2.025 million civil penalty to the CFPB.… Continue Reading
Our podcast show today features John Culhane and Mike Kilgarriff, partners in Ballard Spahr’s Consumer Financial Services group. They discuss what supervision and enforcement will look like under a new acting director/director appointed by President Trump. This episode is a repurposing of the second half of a webinar that was produced on January 6.… Continue Reading
The CFPB and the National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts—a group of fifteen securitization trusts that acquire, pool, and securitize student loans—have entered into a proposed final consent judgment that, if approved, would resolve the CFPB’s allegations that the Trusts unlawfully filed defective debt collection lawsuits to collect on private student loans.… Continue Reading
The CFPB has taken action against the Draper & Kramer Mortgage Corp. (DKMC) based on allegations of discriminatory lending activities that, according to the CFPB, discouraged homebuyers from applying to the company for home mortgage loans in majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the Chicago and Boston areas.
The CFPB alleged that from 2019 through 2021, DKMC, a non-bank mortgage lender based in Downers Grove, Illinois, engaged in redlining, and that this resulted in the company significantly underperforming its peers in lending activity in the Chicago and Boston areas.… Continue Reading
If there was any doubt about how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) (under current leadership) feels about what it calls “home equity contracts” (also known as shared appreciation agreements, shared equity agreements, home equity investments, among other names) its actions last week make it clear.
Among the flurry of issuances, enforcement actions and guidance coming out of the CFPB in the lead up to January 20, the bureau took aim at home contracts with i) the issuance of a Consumer Advisory warning consumers about the risks of these types of agreements, ii) the issuance of an Issue Spotlight, which similarly addressed potential risks to homeowners and provided a detailed summary of how these types of products typically work and how their features compare other home equity products, and iii) the filing of an amicus brief in Roberts v.… Continue Reading
