Celebrating 10 years of consumer protection
Today is the 10th anniversary of the Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau. We are proud to celebrate 10 years of
protecting consumers, and we look forward to the next
decade.
In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, it
became clear that the nation needed a financial regulator
solely focused on looking out for consumers. The housing
finance bubble and Great Recession were fueled by reckless
practices in the mortgage industry, which trapped millions
of homeowners in mortgages they could not afford, and
Congress created the CFPB to ensure that never happened
again. The CFPB officially opened its doors as an
independent agency on July 21, 2011, with a simple message
to American families and consumers: We’ve got your
back.
We got to work right away, establishing strong guardrails
to protect consumer and financial markets against a return
to irresponsible mortgage lending. We also focused on
preventing risks to consumers in markets that previously
didn’t have many federal protections, or where the
existing protections hadn’t been updated in decades. For
example, we wrote rules mandating new protections for
consumers signing up for prepaid accounts or sending money
overseas. With the guardrails in place, we are working to
understand the future of financial markets and services,
such as artificial intelligence, and the regulations that
will need to be developed.
Our supervision and enforcement teams rooted out illegal
conduct and secured billions of dollars in relief for
harmed consumers. In addition to expanding access to safe
and affordable credit, our Office of Fair Lending
uncovered discriminatory lending practices against
consumers by bringing historic enforcement actions in
numerous markets, including credit card, auto finance, and
mortgage lending. And we started accepting consumer
complaints – to help consumers connect with companies
directly and get help when they experience problems with
financial products or services – to inform the rest of our
work.
In 2020, we faced a new threat; the COVID-19 pandemic
shook the economy to its core, and made our work to
protect consumers even more urgent. We immediately set to
work supporting and implementing the CARES Act, which
included helping people get their Economic Impact
Payments, setting up a
coronavirus housing portal
for the millions of Americans struggling to pay their rent
or mortgage, and working closely with companies to help
them assist their struggling customers. With federal
housing relief protections set to expire, we are now
helping individuals and families transition into the
post-pandemic economy.
In the past 10 years, we had many achievements that protected American families and consumers, including:
- Our enforcement and supervisory efforts have resulted in approximately $14.4 billion in relief for consumers, and $1.7 billion in civil penalties.
- We delivered economic redress to more than 183 million consumers and consumer accounts.
- Our Office of Consumer Response has received and processed over 3 million consumer complaints.
- Over 7 million consumers have accessed the COVID-19 educational content we’ve created.
In the decade to come, we will continue to use all the tools at our disposal to empower American consumers and work to ensure the financial markets they interact with are fair, transparent, and competitive.
