Monthly Archives: April 2017

Oppose Wall Street’s CHOICE Act

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“This terrible bill ignores the lessons of the financial crisis and includes a huge list of giveaways to Wall Street,” said Lisa Donner, executive director of Americans for Financial Reform. “Though it may work for Wall Street and assorted predatory lenders, it is dangerous policy that is bad for financial stability, bad for consumers, bad for investors, and bad for the real economy.”

Call it what it is: Wall Street’s CHOICE Act. A detailed analysis of the bill can be found here. In broad terms it would:

  • Create unprecedented barriers to regulatory action that would effectively give large financial institutions veto power to overturn or avoid government oversight.
  • Eviscerate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and make it impossible for it to act forcefully against unfair or abusive practices in consumer lending markets.
  • Eliminate critical elements of regulatory reforms passed since the financial crisis, including restrictions on subprime mortgage lending, the Volcker Rule ban on banks engaging in hedge-fund like speculation, and restrictions on excessive Wall Street bonuses.
  • Increase the ability of “too big to fail” financial institutions to hold up taxpayers for a bailout by threatening economic disaster if they failed.
  • Weaken investor protections and accountability in the capital markets, including the elimination of crucial new fiduciary protections for retirement savers.

“The level of venom directed at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that is successfully carrying out its mission of preventing tricks and traps that harm American families, is astounding,” Donner said. “The changes proposed by the legislation only make sense if you want to weaken consumer protections and make it easier for Wall Street, and predatory lenders, to profit by cheating people.”

Wall Street’s CHOICE Act would:

  • End the Consumer Bureau’s authority to supervise large banks, returning to the failed consumer regulatory model that brought us the financial crisis.
  • Take away the Consumer Bureau’s core authority to take on unfair, deceptive and abusive practices, a power that has enabled the Bureau to stop Wells Fargo from opening fake accounts in their customers’ names; prohibit lenders from making false threats in debt collection; and refund consumers tricked into paying for worthless credit card add-ons.
  • Limit supervision of non-bank financial companies.
  • Undermine the Consumer Bureau’s independence, making it subject to the whims of the White House and Wall Street lobbyists.
  • Eliminate all CFPB jurisdiction over payday and title loans, preventing it it from taking on the unaffordable lending at the heart of the payday debt trap, and also from acting against payday lenders that break the law.
  • Stop the Consumer Bureau’s rulemaking on forced arbitration, which is otherwise on track to restore consumers rights to hold financial institutions accountable in court if they break the law..
  • Create massive loopholes in the rules put in place to discourage the kind of unaffordable mortgages that were at the heart of the foreclosure crisis.
  • Hide the public consumer complaint system that has been so useful in making financial companies more responsive to their customers.

NetSpend Stealthily Settles FTC Charges Ahead of Fight Over CFPB Prepaid Card Rules

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The Georgia company leading the charge against new rules for prepaid cards has agreed to refund $53 million for denying customers’ access to their own money despite ads promising “instant access.”

The under-the-radar settlement between NetSpend and the Federal Trade Commission was released late last Friday night, just two days after Senator David Perdue and other Georgia lawmakers quietly moved to utilize an obscure law to block the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s prepaid card rule. That rule would guard consumers against fraud, improve disclosures of hidden fees, and limit – although not prohibit – prepaid cards with overdraft features that turn the cards into high-cost credit products.  The rule also protects workers by requiring employers to disclose fees on payroll cards before employees sign up and making sure that workers know they do not need to accept their pay in that form.

Prepaid cards should be just that: prepaid, as are 98 percent of such cards currently on the market. NetSpend is the big exception to the rule – the only major prepaid company with opt-in overdraft fees, deceptively marketed as “protection.” NetSpend primarily sells its cards, which can repeatedly trigger $15-$25 overdraft fees, through payday lenders and employers, such as fast food chains. The company’s biggest single distributor is the payday lending chain ACE Cash Express. NetSpend cards are also unusual in permitting payday lenders to debit accounts on a user’s payday, potentially triggering an overdraft fee.

The company is fighting the CFPB rule because, it has told investors, it stands to lose roughly $80 million in fees annually if the rule goes through.

Users of prepaid cards often live paycheck to paycheck. But after wooing customers with ads promising “guaranteed approval” and “immediate access” to funds with “no waiting,” NetSpend kept some people waiting for weeks, or never approved them at all, even after they had loaded money onto their cards. The FTC order prohibits NetSpend from misrepresenting its card activation procedures in the future, in addition to requiring the company to return $53 million to those who were denied access to their money.

Largely at NetSpend’s behest, lawmakers have filed resolutions in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, invoking the rarely used Congressional Review Act to keep the CFPB’s prepaid card rule from taking effect. If the resolutions are approved, the consumer watchdog will be forever barred from enacting a substantially similar rule without Congress’s permission.

The largest prepaid card company, Green Dot, supports the CFPB’s rule, which basically assures prepaid card users of protections they already enjoy with credit and debit cards. In fact, no prepaid card company other than NetSpend has come out against the rule. It would be outrageous for Congress to block these common sense protections for millions of Americans simply in order to allow a single company to keep gouging cash-strapped families with overdraft fees to the collective tune of $80 million or more a yea

The prepaid card rule is scheduled to go into effect on October 1, 2017, although the CFPB has agreed to extend the effective date until to April 1, 2018, to allow companies more time to bring their practices into full compliance. — Lauren Saunders

Lauren Saunders is Associate Director of the National Consumer Law Center
Related National Consumer Law Center Related Materials: