In case you didn’t know, over 300 credit card issuers are required to send the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) a copy of their credit cardholder agreement once every quarter. This information is made available to consumers at the credit card agreement database on the official CFPB website. Card issuers are legally required to provide this under the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibly and Disclosure (CARD) Act.
The CFPB has just proposed that this process be put on hold for twelve months while they improve the system for receiving and adding these agreements to the data base. Despite this possible reprieve credit card issuers would still be required to post these credit card agreements on their own websites so that consumers can access them.
CFPB director, Richard Cordray had this to say:
“Streamlining the process for how credit card companies submit their agreements to us could help save time and reduce burden for both industry and our agency….Updating this process should also give consumers and other users access to the data in a faster and more useable form.
During this time the CFPB will also manually collect credit card agreements from the largest credit card issuers and add these to their database so that the majority of cardholders will still have access to this information on the CFPB database.
If this gives the CFPB more time to investigate other issues relating to credit card issuers and consumer finance in general, I’m all for this change. Consumers will still have access to these agreements on the individual credit card websites. I daresay this will also improve the profile of the CFPB database when it does return, as the vast majority of consumers were unlikely to know it existed.
You can view the full proposal by going here (PDF warning). You can also read the CFPB announcement here.
