Acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney recently said the agency is still providing fair lending oversight, contrary to reports in the media. Meanwhile, a new controversy has erupted over the political appointee named to lead the agency’s fair lending operations. “We are still very much in the fair lending business and we are going to remain active in that space,” said Mulvaney in a fair lending symposium held by the CFPB. Consumer advocates have been concerned ...

Mortgage trade groups are asking the CFPB to reopen the loan originator compensation rule to reduce lenders’ regulatory burden and better serve consumers. A dozen industry trade groups – including the American Bankers Association, the Mortgage Bankers Association and the Real Estate Service Providers Council – recently wrote to Acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney with suggested changes to the agency’s LO compensation rule under the ...

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 ...