Rohit Chopra is using his final weeks as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to remind banks and other financial industry groups that there’s something for them to love about the regulator they mostly love to hate.
Over the past month, the bureau has issued a flurry of new rules and regulatory proposals designed to do things like monitor big tech companies’ payment services and rein in the sale of consumers’ personal data. The rules have garnered praise from financial industry groups and others who generally don’t have anything nice to say about how Mr. Chopra has been running the agency.
The more palatable regulations come ahead of a Republican takeover of Washington that could once again put the consumer agency in the cross hairs. Republicans have long tried to chip away at the agency’s power and independence. More recently, banks have challenged its authority in lawsuits over rules established under Mr. Chopra’s direction.
“The rulemakings that we’ve seen over the past three weeks are strategically intended to show that there are indeed areas of bipartisan agreement in the financial regulatory system, and, by extension, that the C.F.P.B. has a legitimate place in the regulatory ecosystem,” said Isaac Boltansky, an analyst at the brokerage firm BTIG.
The bureau’s latest actions could help blunt some of financial industry representatives’ fierce anger toward it, which has only grown over Mr. Chopra’s tenure. It could also create fissures between competing forces in the industry that could make it harder for officials to completely do away with some of the bureau’s latest rules or eliminate the agency altogether.
For instance, powerful banks have applauded the bureau’s move to regulate the payments services that big tech firms offer to customers. Banks have long argued that if their companies must be subject to extensive regulation, then tech firms providing the same services should as well. If the consumer bureau were weakened enough that it could not carry out this task, it could put banks at a competitive disadvantage.
