Blog

Congress has charged the CFPB with ensuring that markets for consumer financial products are competitive. Over the last year, the CFPB has taken a number of steps to promote competition in our markets.

As part of CFPB’s continued effort to combat housing insecurity and promote racial equity, the Bureau is partnering with the Department of Housing and Urban Development to lead a tech sprint on post-pandemic housing challenges. We are asking participants to develop innovative digital tools to raise visibility of housing assistance resources focused on alleviating challenges faced by those with housing insecurity and aiding the connection of housing insecure households and the small landlords that serve them to those providing aid.

I’m pleased to release the results from our first tech sprints, which sought to identify innovations and improvements in the way lenders notify consumers of adverse credit actions, as well as how we collect and process home mortgage data.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced its first Tech Sprint to reduce regulatory burden and improve consumer understanding of financial services.

Spotlight on providing adverse action notices under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Fair Credit Reporting Act when using artificial intelligence, including machine learning models.

The Bureau is committed to ensuring fair, equitable, and nondiscriminatory access to credit for both individuals and communities. This report describes our fair lending activities in innovation, outreach, prioritization, guidance and rulemaking, supervision, and enforcement for calendar year 2019.

An update on results provided under the Bureau’s No-Action Letter on alternative data and machine learning

The Bureau’s new Office of Innovation is proposing a “Disclosure Sandbox” to give companies leeway to test new disclosures or delivery methods that may better serve consumers.

We are launching a research pilot in collaboration with Credit Karma to improve understanding of consumer financial well-being.

Our first-ever no-action letter is being issued to Upstart.

Many new financial innovations rely on people choosing to give a company access to their digital financial records held by another company. If you’re using these kinds of services, we’d love to hear from you. Make your voice heard.

We released the results of a Project Catalyst research project finding that offering a small incentive to prepaid card users to put some of their money into a savings wallet doubled uptake of the wallet.

Take a look around and you’ll see that the consumer financial marketplace is experiencing constant and rapid change. New technologies and insights can impact the way we borrow, save, transact, and receive information we need about finances. This environment can pose benefits and risks to consumers. Consumer-friendly innovation can drive down costs, improve transparency, and make people’s lives better. On the other hand, new products can also pose unexpected risks to consumers through dangers such as hidden costs or confusing terms.

Today, we’re announcing that as part of Project Catalyst, we’ll be working with H&R Block to evaluate practices to promote consumer saving behavior during tax time.

We’re announcing a research pilot aimed at assessing the potential impact of early intervention credit counseling. We know that defaulting on credit card debt is a very stressful event for anyone and impacts consumers’ ability to access credit in the future. We’d like to use this opportunity to explore what ways may help consumers better manage their credit card debt and avoid default.

We have finalized a new trial disclosure policy, which allows companies to apply for a waiver to test potential disclosure improvements on a trial basis. The new policy is one more tool at our disposal, which is good news for consumers and companies. The tests will provide us with data that will help inform improvements to disclosure rules.

Yesterday, we made a significant update to our proposed policy to encourage trial disclosure programs, which allow companies, on a trial basis, to test disclosures that may work better for consumers and companies. Data from the trial program would then help us determine if the proposed innovation works better than the status quo. We are inviting comments on Section A of the revised proposed policy, which describes the information companies should submit to us for their proposals. This comment process lasts 30 days, until July 18.

Thanks to your feedback and discussions with stakeholders, we’ve made some important revisions and clarifications to the proposed policy

The initiatives announced at the start of Project Catalyst are gaining early traction. In November 2012 in Mountain View, Calif., we launched Project Catalyst, a program to support the creation and growth of innovative consumer financial products and services. The pilot collaborations we announced at our November launch have been actively moving forward.

We were in Mountain View, CA for the launch of Project Catalyst. The live event has ended. CFPB Director Richard Cordray announced the launch of Project Catalyst to encourage consumer-friendly innovation. You can read CFPB Director Cordray’s remarks. If you missed the event, you can watch below: