The CFPB Now Wants to Work With Loan Marketplaces?

Things are getting weird in government land. The CFPB, the regulator in charge of collecting data from small business finance companies starting this Fall, has just revealed what one of its long term goals of that might be, incorporating the data into loan marketplaces.

That’s because on Wednesday, CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said that he plans to do exactly that with another industry the agency collects data on, the credit card industry.

…reliable information about interest rates is also just hard to come by. So, we instead see people comparing cards by annual fee, or rewards, or perhaps just signing up for a card from the same bank where they have a checking account, assuming the interest rate they’re charged will be competitive. To help make this process easier, we are assembling a pricing data set for third-party comparison websites and others to use to help consumers find the best deal for them. This will rely on data submitted under existing requirements of the 1988 law. I hope to share more about those plans in the coming months.

While it may be a leap at this stage to say that this will happen in the small business finance industry any time soon, virtually none of the speculation surrounding what the CFPB will actually do with the data it collects, if anything at all, has been that it would be integrated into loan marketplaces for merchants to compare options. Given current trends across all levels of government this is not so preposterous. For example, the City of New York just introduced its own business loan marketplace and the SBA just upgraded theirs. Couple this with a slew of recent regulatory enforcement activity in the private sector and the idea that there is a plan for government-run business loan marketplaces that are powered by federal agency loan data for comparison shopping is not incomprehensible.

Sean Murray is the President and Chief Editor of deBanked and the founder of the Broker Fair Conference. Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. You can view all future deBanked events here.