Cordray’s Semi-Annual Report to Congress Focuses on Mortgages/Lending (March 3, 2015)
CFPB Director Richard Cordray addressed the House Financial Services Committee on March 3 for the bureau’s semi-annual report to Congress. The prepared remarks largely focused on the mortgage, lending and remittance rules. The NPRM on prepaid accounts—comments for which are due March 23—were not specifically mentioned in Cordray’s written testimony.
Cordray touched on several highlights from the agency’s work, including:
- Finalizing a rule to promote more effective annual privacy disclosures from financial institutions to their customers, which the CFPB estimates could save the industry about $17 million annually if the new online disclosure method is widely adopted.
- Issuing final revisions to the remittance rule to clarify some of the new consumer protections, while providing federally insured institutions more time to allow for more accurate disclosures in certain cases.
- Proposing a rule to overhaul the reporting requirements for the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.
- Securing orders through enforcement actions for more than $5.3 billion in relief to more than 15 million consumers.
- Bringing enforcement actions that secured $1.6 billion in relief for consumers related to deceptive marketing of credit card add-on products, a predatory lending scheme and other deceptive and discriminatory credit card practices, and
- Filing suit against a company for operating a “debt collection lawsuit mill” that intimidated consumers with deceptive court filings, totaling more than 350,000 lawsuits in four years in Georgia alone.
“Our supervision program continues to be refined, improved and expanded,” Cordray said. “During this reporting period, we continued to build out our risk-based supervision program both for banks and for nonbank financial firms. That approach is enabling us to provide more consistent treatment that ensures compliance with federal consumer financial laws and helps level the playing field among competing firms in mortgage origination, mortgage servicing, debt collection, student loan servicing and other markets.”
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