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Credit Card Hotline Causes Next Fight Over Customer Bureau

By Cornelius Nunev


The latest fight over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau involves a charge card hotline. The hotline would take grievances and other information directly from customers. The agency would compile the data and choose to act when appropriate. That said, since the CFPB hasn't disclosed how it proposes to investigate the information, and that is partially why banks want the data restricted. This would help keep all payday advance information private.

Banks and card corporations want to avoid crowd-sourced penalties

A lot of debate was put into the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before the charge card hot-line was considered. This hotline would make it so customers can complain about credit card issuers and practices they have, Daily Finance states. Consumers can call in to report abuse, and that data would be disseminated by the Bureau to the appropriate state regulatory bodies. Basi-cally, the complaint system would be crowdsourcing; the data would come straight from the individuals. Then, government officials would get the grievances and fine card issuers. They wouldn't even try to determine what the issue was first. Most banks and card is-suers are hoping to keep the complaints private. That means the information would stay between the bank, the government agency and the person who complained rather than having a public database.

Flow of in-formation to stay with banks

The idea behind making the data private is that it restricts the flow of raw data, which can be unfairly biased against banks. Right now, the complaint line will start with the Consumer Financial Protection Bu-reau. This is anticipated to occur on July 21. The line is set up so the data could be seen by everyone who wants to see it. That means complaint data can easily be accessed. Though it may seem that banks and card issuers want to keep this data from the public to keep every person from seeing the dishonest practices they engage in, there's a fair point to consider; a lot of people are apt to complain about fees regardless of whether those fees were fairly levied. It might be good to get information right from the public. Having no restraints on it might be a poor choice though.

How the future is looking

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will have authority to regulate, to some extent, vir-tually all manners of consumer finance like charge cards, mortgages, payday loans, debit cards and so on. Congress has been fighting over the organization. Three different bills were recently intro-duced to limit the bureau, according to Reuters, two of which concern who's in charge. One of these would give a five member panel power instead of one director while another would keep the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from having power until a director is assigned. Elizabeth Warren is the White House advi-sor getting the bureau ready that has been considered for director, however Republicans are against that. The bureau is sup-posed to start operations in July. This might not really happen though.




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