June 30: CFPB Updates This Week
PUBLISHED The CFPB’s 2022 Fair Lending Annual Report to Congress
The CFPB released its Fair Lending Annual Report to Congress , describing our fair lending activities in enforcement and supervision; guidance and rulemaking; interagency coordination; and outreach and education for calendar year 2022.In 2022, the CFPB’s fair lending work centered on the consumers and communities most affected by unlawful discrimination. These efforts included working with our federal and state partners to address redlining as well as confronting deep-seated discrimination in the home appraisal industry. The CFPB also released several reports shining a light on factors that may influence fair access to credit, including how medical debt affects tens of millions of consumers’ credit profiles, how people in under-resourced rural areas struggle to access financial services, and the challenges faced by justice-involved individuals and families. Read more
Office of Research blog: How are mortgages with a COVID-related forbearance performing in 2023?
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government enacted the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, allowing millions of mortgage borrowers in the United States to enter public or private forbearance programs and temporarily pause their mortgage payments. In reports from May 2021 and March 2022 , the CFPB explored the characteristics and demographics of mortgage borrowers during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on those who were in forbearance.In this post, we use recent data from the National Mortgage Database to compare the performance of mortgage borrowers in March 2023 to those in March 2021 that had COVID-related forbearance, were delinquent but not in forbearance, and those considered current on their payments. While we expressed concern in both 2021 and 2022 about borrowers’ ability to recover from periods of forbearance, our most recent analysis shows that the majority of borrowers in forbearance in 2021 – including Black and Hispanic borrowers – were largely able to become current on their payments by March 2023. Read more
The CFPB issues order against payment processor ACI Worldwide Corp. and its subsidiary ACI Payments Inc. (ACI) improperly initiating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued an order against ACI Worldwide and one of its subsidiaries, ACI Payments, for improperly initiating approximately $2.3 billion in unlawful mortgage payment transactions. ACI’s data handling practices negatively impacted nearly 500,000 homeowners with mortgages serviced by Mr. Cooper (formerly known as Nationstar). By unlawfully processing erroneous and unauthorized transactions, ACI opened homeowners to overdraft and insufficient funds fees from their financial institutions. Today’s order requires ACI, among other things, to pay a $25 million civil money penalty. Read more
PUBLISHED Protecting consumers’ right to challenge discrimination
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is committed to ensuring fair, equitable, and nondiscriminatory access to credit for individuals and communities. The CFPB administers and enforces federal laws such as the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, a landmark civil rights law that protects people against discrimination in all aspects of credit transactions. Under the law, consumers targeted by race, religion, age, or any other prohibited basis with predatory lending products or practices also have the right to challenge that discrimination by bringing a lawsuit. Yet lenders engaged in discriminatory acts or practices sometimes unfairly try to make consumers sign away that right. Fortunately, many courts have rejected attempts to make people sign away crucial legal rights. Read more