Articles by deBanked Staff
Congressional Resolution Aims to Undo CFPB’s Small Business Lending Rules
June 12, 2023
After 13 years of regulatory debate and 888-pages of official rules finally ready to go into effect, some members of Congress have decided that the whole thing is all wrong. At issue is a section of a 2010 federal law that requires the CFPB to collect data from companies engaged in small business financing. However, for more than a decade the statute became a political football, creating delays and sowing confusion over who it is that is supposed to be covered. Lawsuits filed against the CFPB finally prompted it to move forward with its mandate which culminated in an 888-page rulebook that was published in March.
On May 31, however, members of the House and Senate introduced a Joint Resolution to invalidate the rules.
“Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Congress disapproves the rule submitted by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau relating to “Small Business Lending Under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (Regulation B)” (88 Fed. Reg. 35150), and such rule shall have no force or effect.”
A hearing on the matter is scheduled to be heard on June 14 at 10am. As part of it, CFPB Director Rohit Chopra is expected to testify.
Update: Hearing is here:
It remains to be seen whether the Resolution will carry weight. There are 23 Republican co-sponsors of the bill and 0 Democrats.
Connecticut Passes Commercial Financing Disclosure Bill
June 7, 2023
Connecticut has passed a commercial financing disclosure bill. See: SB1032. The bill now just needs to be signed by the governor. The planned effective date is July 1, 2024.
Connecticut’s bill has several unique rules in addition to standard disclosures already seen in other states. They include:
1. A provider shall not revoke, withdraw or modify a specific offer until midnight of the third calendar day after the date of the specific offer.
2. Providers and brokers must register with the Banking Commissioner.
3. No commercial financing contract shall contain any provision waiving a recipient’s right to notice, judicial hearing or prior court order in connection with the provider obtaining any prejudgment remedy, including, but not limited to, attachment, execution, garnishment or replevin, upon commencing any litigation against the recipient.
The bill has been added to deBanked’s state regulation map.
Kate Fisher, Chris Murray Recipients of the Greg Nowak Impact Award
June 5, 2023
The Alternative Finance Bar Association selected two recipients for this year’s Greg Nowak Impact Award. They were Katherine C. Fisher, Partner of Hudson Cook, LLP and Christopher R. Murray, Managing Member of Murray Legal, PLLC. Winners are generally selected for their all-around efforts for the legal community both on matters of law and outside of it.
Greg Nowak, who passed away in 2021, was a partner of Troutman Pepper and a beloved founding member of the AFBA. The winner of last year’s award was David A. Picon, a Partner of Proskauer Rose LLP.
Block CEO Jack Dorsey Favors RFK Jr. For President
June 4, 2023Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter and current CEO of Block (aka Square), tweeted that Democratic candidate RFK Jr. could beat both Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis in the 2024 presidential election. When pressed what this meant, he replied that this was both a prediction and an endorsement.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the son of Robert Kennedy who was assassinated in 1968.
He can and will https://t.co/zrKLc2BKhz
— jack (@jack) June 4, 2023
RFK Jr. is a strongly pro-bitcoin, pro-cryptocurrency candidate. A potential motive behind Dorsey’s support is that Block has not only cumulatively invested $220M in bitcoin itself but also that the company depends on selling bitcoin for nearly half of its overall revenue. Block recorded $7.1B in bitcoin revenue in 2022 and $10B in bitcoin revenue in 2021. That only amounted to 3% and 5% of the total gross profit for each year respectively, however.
RFK Jr. recently spoke at a bitcoin conference in Miami, he accepts campaign donations in bitcoin, and he was recently quoted as referring to bitcoin as “freedom money.”
Prosper Originates $631.9M in Q1
May 23, 2023Prosper Marketplace originated $631.9M in loans in the first quarter of 2023, up 13% YoY. Ninety percent of Prosper’s Q1 2023 loans were funded through their Whole Loan channel, down slightly from the 92% in Q4 2022. The company generated a loss of $9M on about $38M in revenue.
Prosper is one of the few fintech lenders from the ancient era to somewhat stick with its original business model. Although it moved away from peer-to-peer to Whole Loan sales, it did not become a bank like its competitors LendingClub and SoFi did. Prosper also seems to have stabilized after some tumultuous growth years in the pre-covid era.
Register for The 5th Annual Alternative Finance Bar Association Conference
May 22, 2023The AFBA Conference is BACK.
If you are an attorney in this industry, you won’t want to miss the Alternative Finance Bar Association’s (AFBA) 5th Annual Conference, here in NYC June 5-6. They will be covering current events in the legal world of alternative finance, including upcoming NY disclosure requirements, recent caselaw developments, latest in collections law, regulatory current events and a lot more. This is an extremely reputable bar association with top notch attorneys in the field.
For more detailed information & a registration link, click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/afba-5th-annual-conference-tickets-622494496797
deBanked Updates Some Resource Pages
May 21, 2023deBanked has made the following edits to its website:
|
1. The FREE UCC SEARCH link list is now presented in map format.
2. State regulations can now be tracked in map format. 3. deBanked’s signature video podcasts are now available in audio-only format on spotify. |
Murray Loses Election for ENS Foundation Directorship
May 21, 2023
deBanked president Sean Murray was one of two nominees earlier this month for an open director position of the ENS Foundation. ENS stands for the Ethereum Name Service, a protocol that allows users to substitute human readable usernames for long hexadecimal strings commonly associated with crypto addresses.
Instead of one’s address looking like this: 0x64233eAa064ef0d54ff1A963933D0D2d46ab5829, it could be debanked.eth or debanked.com or sean.debanked.com or some other domain name owned by the user.
Murray has been an advocate for ENS names as a form of web-based identity. He was one of the first 500 people in the world to use a .com address as an ENS name and the first in the world to turn a .com address into an NFT on mainnet using the official ENS Namewrapper contract. debanked.com, for example, is not only a website address, but also a crypto address and an NFT. Murray has been studying crypto since 2014 and deployed his first deBanked smart contract to ethereum in 2021.
Murray lost the election in a blowout but has expressed that his candidacy led to some positive changes in the ENS ecosystem. The ENS Foundation represents the technology’s official DAO. Murray’s competition was more qualified than he was for the role. The victor, Alex Van de Sande, helped launch ethereum, launched the first Ethereum wallet and Web3 Browser, and was a co-founder of ENS.
“I anticipate there eventually being some crossover between the traditional financial system and blockchain technology,” Murray said. “A username system would be an integral part of that. I’m not into speculating on coins or anything of that nature.”
