On June 22, 2022, the CFPB announced that it is taking the first step toward addressing credit card company penalty policies costing consumers $12 billion each year, starting by looking at excessive late fees. The CFPB has published an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking published where it asks for information on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors’ 2010 immunity provision for excessive late fees that allows credit card companies to escape enforcement scrutiny.

On June 17, 2022, the CFPB released an article, authored by Director Rohit Chopra, about how CFPB is seeking to move away from highly complicated rules towards simpler and clearer rules. The CFPB director believes that “markets work best when rules are simple, easy to understand, and easy to enforce.”

On June 16, 2022, the CFPB released an article focusing on the agency’s efforts to collect key metrics from some supervised institutions regarding the consumer impact of their overdraft and non-sufficient fund (NSF) practices. In early December of 2021, we wrote an article about the CFPB’s research on banks’ dependence on overdraft fees. Since then, the Bureau has been actively conducting close supervision to financial institutions with high shares of frequent overdrafters or with higher average fee burden for overdrafts.

On June 14, 2022, the CFPB Director Rohit Chopra announced, at a public town hall, Request for Information on how bank customers can assert their rights to better customer service with big banks. The Request for Information seeks data about, and consumer experiences with, the obstacles that may prevent people from receiving high standards of customer service and high-quality human interactions with their banks or credit unions.

On June 13, 2022, the CFPB released its annual report on the top financial concerns facing servicemembers, veterans, and military families, based on the complaints they submitted to the CFPB. Concerns reported by the servicemembers include billing inaccuracies and that debt collectors used aggressive tactics to recover allegedly unpaid medical bills. Servicemembers also reported failures by credit reporting companies in helping to resolve inaccuracies and other credit reporting issues.