CFPB, Federal Agencies, State Agencies, and Attorneys General
Republicans on Capitol Hill are seeking to repeal a section of the Dodd-Frank Act that requires financial institutions to report information contained in loan applications submitted by women-owned, minority-owned and LGBTQI+-owned small businesses.
“My bill seeks to eliminate costly regulatory burdens on financial institutions, ensuring greater access to credit for small businesses,” House Small Business Committee Chairman Rep.… Continue Reading
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has struck down the FTC’s controversial CARS Rule, saying that the commission violated its own procedural rules by failing to issue an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“ANPRM”) before publishing the rule.
“The FTC asserts that even if the Commission was required to publish an ANPRM, its failure to do so was ultimately harmless error,” two of the judges on the three-judge panel wrote.… Continue Reading
Contending that he wants to ensure that the CFPB is in line with Trump Administration policies, acting bureau Director Scott Bessent has reportedly ordered the agency to stop virtually all work.
President Trump designated Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury, to be Acting Director of the agency, after firing Director Rohit Chopra this past weekend.… 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
Although many pundits speculated that President Trump would appoint Russell Vought as Acting Director once Vought is confirmed by the Senate to be Director of OMB, the CFPB reported today that, on January 31, Trump actually appointed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to be acting director. (The Federal Vacancies Reform Act authorizes the President to appoint as an acting director of a federal agency someone who has already been confirmed by the Senate for a position in another agency.)… 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 New York State Department of Financial Services has released a proposed rule that would regulate overdraft, non-sufficient funds (NSF), and return deposit item fees charged by banks, trust companies, savings banks, savings and loan associations, credit unions and investment companies.
Under the proposal, announced by Gov. Kathy Hochul, state-chartered banking institutions would be prohibited from charging:
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
