The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau plans to create a regulatory ‘sandbox’ to allow financial technology companies to experiment with new products face a big potential obstacle: Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee.
“I am very concerned by the Consumer Bureau proposal, issued in the last days of Mick Mulvaney’s leadership, to significantly loosen its ‘no-action letter’ policy in a way that could let bad actors that abuse consumers off the hook entirely from enforcement action by the agency,” Waters said in a release on Tuesday. “This is yet another step to weaken the Consumer Bureau and curtail its enforcement tools.”
The proposal would expand an existing CFPB program in which the bureau issues letters to companies ensuring them that the agency won’t penalize them for experiments with products that push the existing boundaries of financial services laws and regulations.
Under a previous program, called Project Catalyst, the bureau sought to enable companies in a similar manner but asked that they share data in order to maintain transparency. The new program suggested by the CFPB proposes doing away with that data sharing requirement.
Catalyst was an initiative of former bureau director Richard Cordray, an Obama appointee who clashed with congressional Republicans. Former Acting Director Mick Mulvaney, the Trump administration’s budget chief who clashed with congressional Democrats, pushed for the sandbox expansion and hired a former Arizona state attorney general’s office official, Paul Watkins, to run the initiative. Trump appointee Kathy Kraninger was sworn in this week to replace Mulvaney.
Financial technology startups saw the Catalyst program as too conservative in granting exemptions and pushed for an expansion. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, along with regulators past and present, see potential for financial technology firms to reach more of the millions of low-income Americans cut off from the banking system. But consumer advocates and Democrats fear that existing high-interest loan companies, like payday lenders, could take advantage of new rules aimed at fostering technological innovation, like algorithms aimed at better assessing creditworthiness, or that new systems could potentially be discriminatory.
“While it is important for our financial regulators to encourage responsible innovation, this is a deeply irresponsible overreach that instead encourages and abets consumer abuses by putting certain financial institutions in an enforcement-free-zone,” Waters argued.
