New Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Should Regulate Online Advertising of Financial Products

Huffington Post
August 16, 2011
Newman, Nathan

One of the first priorities for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which opened its doors this summer, is writing rules for regulating the activities of "non-banks" that still potentially affect the financial well-being of consumers. The CFPB's goals include creating a single regulator to define and guarantee basic consumer protections across a wide range of financial institutions -- and even many institutions that are not usually considered financial institutions but that play a key role in the U.S. financial system nonetheless. Under the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB can regulate larger non-bank "participants" in the financial system; and the agency has been seeking comments on what financial markets to cover, how to define a "large" participant, and what kinds of data it should be collecting to protect consumers. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other online intermediaries are playing an increasingly integral role in the financial world; and the CFPB must first collect more data to measure what their impact is on consumers and, secondly, write rules to protect those consumers.
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