CFPB: CARD Act is working but. . .
by. Henry Meier
If the Bureau was a creation of the twentieth century, we could all breathe a sigh of relief this morning. The Bureau released the first of its Dodd-Frank mandated reports analyzing the CARD Act, which was passed in 2009, and the Bureau’s overall assessment is that the legislation has worked pretty much as Congress intended. Specifically, credit card over limit fees, and arbitrary repricing of the cost of credit “have been largely eliminated” because of the Act. What’s more, young people are no longer getting solicitations for credit cards they cannot afford.
The credit card industry will never be perfect for the consumer protection champion, but with so many other regulations being imposed in the coming months, surely the overall effectiveness of the CARD Act means that credit unions can take their open-ended disclosure vendors off speed dial, at least for a while.
But alas, this regulator is not a relic of the twentieth century but a cutting edge regulator born in the twenty-first century dedicated to the proposition that every regulation impacting consumers should be rewritten to reflect the way it would have been promulgated had the CFPB been in charge. So even though the CARD ACT has been generally successful, here are some of the issues highlighted by the CFPB that could ultimately impact credit union operations in the months or years ahead.
- Portal transparency issues. With more and more people paying their bills online, “it is unclear how easily the full set of required disclosures . . . could be translated into an online payment screen.”