Financial Regulatory Forum

By Emmanuel Olaoye

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK, July 26 (Thomson Reuters Accelus) - The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should expand the disclosure protections on debit and credit cards to general purpose reloadable prepaid cards, but it should provide flexibility on the disclosures that prepaid card issuers have to make to consumers, a major U.S. banking trade group said on Tuesday.

In a comment letter submitted yesterday, the American Bankers Association said that the general purpose reloadable, or GPR, prepaid cards should be given the same protections as prepaid cards such as gift cards, but the CFPB should recognize that there are a variety of GPR cards and that the market will continue to evolve.  (more…)

By Scott McCleskey, Complinet

The past year was a busy one for those interested in financial reform – you know, Dodd-Frank and all that. But the new year will be even more fateful in shaping the markets for decades to come. It is likely to be the most critical of the post-financial crisis period. The reason is that Dodd-Frank only gave the regulators their marching orders, and 2010 mostly saw just the preliminaries to the really tough regulation. It will be in 2011 that actual rules will be proposed, finalized and implemented – and all by mid-year, if deadlines are met. It will also be when the Republicans hit the beach in the House and attempt to moderate or reverse many of the reforms already underway.

There will be a tidal wave of Dodd-Frank work, and some areas of focus are already obvious. The launch and first steps of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will be one, and the rather iffy implementation of derivatives regulation will be another. These items have been and will continue to be covered by this organization and others. But there are other items largely outside the Dodd-Frank ecosystem which bear a close watch over the coming year – and there are also some receiving a lot of press lately which can be ignored. (more…)