Consumer advocates love the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and business groups are fighting him. We talked to Rohit Chopra about how he's cracking down on big banks and Big Tech for the MarketWatch 50 list.
In March, Rohit Chopra was invited to give a virtual speech at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school known for churning out finance-minded graduates who fill the rosters of Wall Street firms. A graduate of Penn’s Wharton School, Chopra himself had been part of this club. But he quickly established that he was no longer necessarily a friend, laying out a plan for reining in Wall Street and corporate rule-breakers.
In addition to putting repeat regulatory offenders on notice, Chopra–a former Federal Trade Commissioner and CFPB student-loan ombudsman–has found new muscles for the agency to flex. Chopra’s CFPB has beefed up its enforcement actions, last year shutting down the lending operations of small-dollar lender LendUp Loans for alleged repeat regulatory violations, and in October, suing an event registration company for using “online trickery” to enroll consumers in a subscription discount club.
Tell that to the nation’s biggest business groups. Chopra’s influence is making them bristle, consumer advocates say. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce this summer launched an ad campaign targeting Chopra personally, saying he “has an outsized and distorted view of his role and power and is driving his own ideological agenda at the expense of American consumers.”
Chopra arrived at the CFPB in 2010, before it was formally launched, and began to specialize in student debt, which was “the wild west of financial regulation,” said Mike Pierce, one of Chopra’s first hires at the CFPB and now executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center.
With Chopra in charge, “the industry’s attention to legal compliance from both in-house and outside counsel is much greater now than it was 18 months ago,” said Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, a nonprofit that promotes the public interest in financial markets. “Not only has the risk of getting caught gone up materially, but the risk of being meaningfully punished has also gone up materially.
Chopra hit on several of his favorite themes, including junk fees and digital “dark patterns”–or design features that can deceive consumers–in announcing the CFPB’s October lawsuit against event registration company ACTIVE Network. The company, a unit of Global Payments GPN, +3.30%, tricked people who were trying to sign up for road races and other events into enrolling in its annual subscription discount club, the agency alleged.
“I worry about a world where a few firms amass so much data that they will be able to use behavioral indicia to set prices and steer business to themselves and disadvantage their competitors,” Chopra said. “I worry a lot about how they will become in some ways legislatures and courts, where they will decide what is allowed to be bought and sold and what payments can be used for.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Priyanka Chopra Steps Out in a Bra Top and Matching Suit in MumbaiFor a recent appearance in Mumbai, the 40-year-old actress and entrepreneur stepped out in a bold blue three-piece suit.
Read more »
Consumer Pressure Is Key to Fixing Dire Labor Conditions in the Clothing Supply ChainThe plethora of different audit systems and standards for assessing labor practices in factories in the apparel supply chain continues to produce disappointing improvements in working conditions. An approach under development would change that by using data from different audit methods to create simple information that consumers could easily understand. By doing so, it would harness the voice of the consumer in the effort to improve labor practices.
Read more »
3 Strategies to Earn Consumer Trust in Email MarketingResearch shows that most Americans are troubled by companies’ usage of their personal data. Perhaps paradoxically, however, consumers also prefer personalized marketing — which requires data. The author suggests three strategies for brands to use in email marketing to personalize messaging while earning and maintaining consumer trust: 1) Make your privacy and opt-in policies clear, 2) Optimize for humans, and 3) Create, test, learn, repeat.
Read more »
Holiday shopping forecast details growth in consumer spending, some economic signals show otherwiseA forecast released Thursday by the National Retail Federation expects to see a 6 to 8 percent growth in holiday spending over 2021.
Read more »
Little boy gets big group hug from friends while twin brother remains in hospitalKids in Maryland shared a sweet moment when they welcomed back their classmate whose twin brother is in the hospital.
Read more »