As it prepares to implement Section 1071 of the Dodd-Frank Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this morning issued a request for information on various aspects of the market for small business loans. Section 1071 calls for the bureau to collect data on women-owned, minority-owned and small businesses.
The bureau sought information in five broad categories: the definition of a small business; what data points the bureau should require to be collected; what lenders should be encompassed by the data collection; what kinds of financial products and credit are offered to small businesses; and privacy concerns related to the data collection. Comments are due 60 days after the filing is published in the Federal Register. The CFPB also released a preliminary report providing the agency’s perspective on the market for lending to small, minority-owned and woman-owned firms and gaps in its understanding.
In a recent white paper for the Treasury Department in response to President Trump’s executive order on financial regulation, ABA said that Section 1071’s conflation of consumer and commercial lending is misguided and that Congress should repeal the provision. “We recommend the elimination of any vestige of Bureau regulatory, supervisory, or enforcement authority over commercial credit or other commercial account and financial services,” ABA said. The association is following the CFPB’s Section 1071 rulemaking process closely and will provide additional information and analysis as it becomes available. For more information, contact ABA’s Barry Mills.