On March 16, 2022 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced changes to its supervisory operations to better protect families and communities from illegal discrimination, including situations where fair lending laws may not apply. In the course of examining banks’ and other companies’ compliance with consumer protection rules, the CFPB will scrutinize discriminatory conduct that violates the federal prohibition against unfair practices.

For example, denying access to a checking account because the individual is of a particular race could be an unfair practice even in those instances where ECOA may not apply.

The CFPB will examine for discrimination in all consumer finance markets, including credit, servicing, collections, consumer reporting, payments, remittances, and deposits.

What does that mean to you?  Do we discriminate in the deposit area?  Let’s run our own audit and see what we do that could be unfair?

Topics include: 

• Account opening procedures
• Account closing procedures
• Issuance of debit cards and reissuance charges
• Overdraft fees and waiver
• Time Deposit/Certificate of Deposit Waiver
• Are customers treated fairly?
• When could we be considered to be favoring one customer over another?
• Audit yourself and get things right

Compliance Officers, Deposit Operations, Branch Administration, BSA Officers, Management, Risk Management and everyone who opens and closes accounts.

Deborah L. Crawford is the President of Gettechnical Inc a Florida based training company.  Her 30+ years of experience began at Hibernia National Bank in New Orleans.  She does training on deposit and frontline operations, BSA, IRAs, compliance and many other areas of the financial institution.  She graduated from Louisiana State University with both her Bachelor and master’s degrees.