The American Bankers Association said many questions about new Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reporting remain unanswered and proposed guidance from the CFPB won’t give lenders sufficient legal protection. The CFPB amended the HMDA rule in 2015, implementing expanded data collection fields specifically mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act along with some based on the bureau’s discretionary authority. The net result expanded the required ...

The CFPB’s recent efforts to create a regulatory sandbox for financial technology (fintech) companies would benefit the mortgage industry, said a former CFPB attorney. Ever since the agency hired Paul Watkins, a lawyer who helped establish the nation’s first regulatory sandbox for fintech companies, to lead its Office of Innovation in July, fintech regulation has become an area of focus at the bureau. The CFPB in August joined a global fintech regulatory initiative ...

The CFPB recently began putting more emphasis on protecting “credit-invisible” consumers and how financial innovation might expand access to credit. Credit-invisible consumers are those without an established credit history with the three national credit reporting agencies who therefore cannot be scored by most traditional credit scoring models. The first CFPB advisory committees meeting this year – held after all the chaos of disbanding and reconstitution ...

Changes made by the Dodd-Frank reform bill, along with other legislative proposals and government actions, would have mixed credit impact on ABS backed by student loans, said Moody’s Investors Service.

Democratic state attorneys general recently vowed to fill the void of the CFPB in fair lending enforcement if the bureau decides not to use disparate-impact analysis under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. “The attorneys general will not hesitate to uphold the law if CFPB acts in manner contrary to law with respect to interpreting ECOA or to fulfilling its Congressional charge to ensure nondiscriminatory lending to the residents of our states,” wrote 14 AGs in ...

The CFPB, together with four other federal agencies, last week affirmed it will not take enforcement action based on supervisory guidance. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., National Credit Union Administration, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the CFPB said supervisory guidance does not have the force and effect of law and cannot lead to enforcement actions. “Examiners will not criticize a supervised ...

A recent report by a government watchdog highlighted the actions taken by Equifax and the CFPB during the year since the public learned about the credit reporting agency’s serious data breach. The U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report on the Equifax data breach, describing in detail how hackers exploited vulnerabilities in the Equifax system to gain access to sensitive personal information for at least 145.5 million individuals. According to ...

The CFPB should drop the current debt-to-income ratio cap and the so-called GSE patch from the qualified-mortgage definition, the Urban Institute recommends. The CFPB is required by statute to review the ability-to-repay rule, which includes the QM definition, and issue a final report on its findings by Jan. 10, 2019. One of the most important elements of the review could be the fate of the “GSE patch,” which is set to expire in January 2021, or on the day ...

Almost 10 months into Acting Director Mick Mulvaney’s tenure at the CFPB, the bureau filed its first new lawsuit. The CFPB last week filed charges against Future Income Payments (FIP), Irvine, CA, in federal district court in the Central District of California. The bureau alleged that FIP’s pension-advance products were loans with interest rates “that are substantially higher than credit card interest rates,” according to the complaint, which also names the company's owner ...

CFPB Updates Model Disclosures Under Fair Credit Reporting Act . The CFPB last week issued an interim final rule updating two model disclosures to reflect changes made to the FCRA by the recent Dodd-Frank reform act.The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which became law in May, requires nationwide consumer reporting agencies to provide “national security freezes” free of charge to consumers. The [Includes three briefs] ...