November 4, 2011
Bullets Are Flying in D.C. (Does D.C. Stand for “Duck and Cover”?)
And here are the bullets from NACHA’s recent Government Relations Advisory Group meeting in Washington:
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) plans to have the new Remittances rule in place by its legislatively mandated deadline in January 2012. EPCOR has been a part of the industry’s effort to comment on what many folks see as overly burdensome disclosure requirements for small value international funds transfers.
- CFPB’s next focus continues to be mortgage disclosures – and will be for “quite some time”. January, 2013 is a key deadline for this one.
- Data collection required by the various federal financial institution regulators needs to be synchronized to streamline the process and eliminate duplication of effort.
- After the Remittances rule (see first bullet), payments is not high on the CFPB’s priority at this time. That does not mean that payments will not ascend to a higher place on the list as time goes by.
- CFPB’s regulation of non-bank (or Credit Union/Thrift) financial service providers is viewed as a high priority but the bureau is currently hamstrung by the absence of a permanent Director. Financial institutions in the NACHA meeting expressed concern about the fact that those entities might continue to enjoy a competitive advantage while new financial institution regulations continue to pile up. Once a Director is in place, it will still take time to ramp up the new regulatory structure since it is being built from the ground up.
See EPCOR’s newest Washington Watch for some discussion of other District happenings. The latest issue includes data breach legislative proposals, CFPB leadership update and initial reactions to first month of interchange fee restrictions.