During his confirmation hearing today, Randal Quarles -- President Trump’s nominee to serve as Federal Reserve vice chairman for supervision -- endorsed the concept of tailored supervision that ABA has done much to work into the policy conversation over the past several years.

In a sixth white paper to the Treasury Department today, ABA highlighted the important role that small-dollar credit plays in helping consumers meet their financial needs, and called on regulators to remove barriers that impede banks from making small-dollar loans.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should preserve and expand the role banks play in providing small-dollar credit to customers -- not restrict banks from making these loans, ABA said in a comment letter on Friday in response to the bureau’s proposal to curtail short-term, small-dollar consumer loans.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau today released a proposed rule that would sharply curtail short-term, small-dollar consumer loans.

In supervising banks that made tax refund anticipation loans, the FDIC made “aggressive and unprecedented” use of its supervisory powers and imposed “high costs” on institutions offering the legal products, according to a review issued today by the FDIC’s inspector general.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is considering applying “ability-to-repay” standards to small dollar loans, which would require lenders to verify a prospective borrower’s income, major financial obligations and borrowing history before making a loan, Director Richard Cordray said today.

More research is needed on payday borrower habits before any regulation curbing payday lending is adopted, say researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The authors examined criticisms of payday lending that are used to justify reform and said that most did not hold up to scrutiny. Research is split, for instance, on whether payday loans help or ...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s reach is spreading and threatening to choke consumers’ access to small-dollar loans, ABA EVP Wayne Abernathy said in an opinion piece published in The Washington Times last week. “Much like planting kudzu in a rose garden, the unchecked spread of the consumer bureau threatens to smother when it tries to protect,” Abernathy wrote. He noted ...

Regulators see fair lending risk in small-dollar loan products that allow significant discretion in pricing and underwriting, according to a panel discussion today at ABA’s Regulatory Compliance Conference.