On December 4, 2018, the CFPB released their annual fair lending report to Congress regarding the fair lending activities that took place in 2017. Traditionally released during April of each year, this years report comes nearly 20 months after the last annual fair lending report to Congress, and is the first report issued by the CFPB under a director different than Richard Cordray, who oversaw the first five reports to congress.
In the current report, the CFPB explains how their focus in 2017 remained on promoting fair, equitable, and nondiscriminatory access to credit in mortgage lending, continuing fair lending supervision of servicing and small business lending, and embarking on new efforts to encourage innovation in expanding credit access.
In their release, the CFPB provided a number of highlights of the 2017 report, including:
announced enforcement actions to address discrimination by a bank in its credit card lending, and against a mortgage lender that failed to report accurate data about the applications it received and loans it made to consumers
monitored lenders and servicers for compliance with the anti-discrimination laws under the Bureau’s jurisdiction
issued a “no-action” letter to a company that uses alternative, or non-traditional, data to make credit and pricing decisions to support innovation and enable people with limited credit history, among others, to obtain credit or obtain credit on better terms
led efforts to collaborate with other federal banking regulators to issue new guidelines on how examiners evaluate whether covered mortgage lenders are reporting accurate data
communicated information on fair lending to the public at large, including industry, consumer and civil rights group, and other stakeholders, through blog posts, Supervisory Highlights reports, and serving as presenters and panelists at a record number of events
The CFPB release can be found here.
The CFPB annual report to Congress can be found here.
NOTE: The 2017 CFPB fair lending report to Congress will be included in our 4th Q 2018 Regulatory Update program, which will be released in January of 2019, covering all of the regulatory changes that a compliance professional needs to be aware of from the activity that occurred during the 4th Q of 2018.