In March, Rohit Chopra was invited to give a virtual speech at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school known for churning out finance-minded graduates who fill the rosters of Wall Street firms. A graduate of Penn’s Wharton School, Chopra himself had been part of this club. But he quickly established that he was no longer necessarily a friend, laying out a plan for reining in Wall Street and corporate rule-breakers.
In addition to putting repeat regulatory offenders on notice, Chopra–a former Federal Trade Commissioner and CFPB student-loan ombudsman–has found new muscles for the agency to flex. Chopra’s CFPB has beefed up its enforcement actions, last year shutting down the lending operations of small-dollar lender LendUp Loans for alleged repeat regulatory violations, and in October, suing an event registration company for using “online trickery” to enroll consumers in a subscription discount club.
Tell that to the nation’s biggest business groups. Chopra’s influence is making them bristle, consumer advocates say. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce this summer launched an ad campaign targeting Chopra personally, saying he “has an outsized and distorted view of his role and power and is driving his own ideological agenda at the expense of American consumers.”
Chopra arrived at the CFPB in 2010, before it was formally launched, and began to specialize in student debt, which was “the wild west of financial regulation,” said Mike Pierce, one of Chopra’s first hires at the CFPB and now executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center.
With Chopra in charge, “the industry’s attention to legal compliance from both in-house and outside counsel is much greater now than it was 18 months ago,” said Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets, a nonprofit that promotes the public interest in financial markets. “Not only has the risk of getting caught gone up materially, but the risk of being meaningfully punished has also gone up materially.
Chopra hit on several of his favorite themes, including junk fees and digital “dark patterns”–or design features that can deceive consumers–in announcing the CFPB’s October lawsuit against event registration company ACTIVE Network. The company, a unit of Global Payments GPN, +3.30%, tricked people who were trying to sign up for road races and other events into enrolling in its annual subscription discount club, the agency alleged.
“I worry about a world where a few firms amass so much data that they will be able to use behavioral indicia to set prices and steer business to themselves and disadvantage their competitors,” Chopra said. “I worry a lot about how they will become in some ways legislatures and courts, where they will decide what is allowed to be bought and sold and what payments can be used for.