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Keep Your Guard Up: Staying Diligent During CFPB’s Reprioritization

Five Areas Where Credit Unions Must Stay Vigilant

Starting in 2025, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) has reduced its supervision and enforcement footprint, dismissing pending actions, reducing staff and scaling back guidance documents.¹ For the financial services industry, this shift has disguised itself as a reprieve from regulatory scrutiny. But compliance risk hasn’t disappeared: it has been redistributed across states, private litigants, and prudential regulators.

Here are five key compliance areas that continue to require attention for credit unions during this period:

State Attorneys General and State Governance Statutes
As federal enforcement has receded, state AGs have filled the void, hiring former CFPB staff and adopting the CFPB’s investigative playbook. Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (“Dodd-Frank”) Section 1042 enables state Attorneys General to independently enforce the CFPA, providing authority to enforce federal consumer laws including the Truth in Lending Act (“TILA”), Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”), Fair Debit Collection Practices Act (“FDCPA”) and Electronic Fund Transfer Act. Additionally, most states now have their own Unfair or Deceptive Acts or Practices/Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices (“UDAP/UDAAP”) statutes that mirror or surpass the federal scope. Institutions operating across multiple states should expect a fragmented, state-by-state compliance landscape rather than a single federal standard.²

Private Litigation and the Plaintiffs’ Bar
A quieter CFPB does nothing to stop private enforcement. Attorneys can file FDCPA, TILA and FCRA claims without any federal agency involvement. Class action filings tied to consumer financial services have continued to rise. Documented, systematic compliance processes remain the best protection against a potential variety of litigants.³

Prudential Regulator Exams
As primary supervision has shifted, the Federal Reserve has suggested examiners rely on state supervisory work. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (“OCC”) and FDIC have proposed redefining unsafe and unsound practices from broad “safety, soundness and compliance culture” oversight to a narrower “quantifiable financial harm” standard. For credit unions and community banks, National Credit Union Administration (“NCUA”) and FDIC state examinations remain active, and examiners in a resource-constrained environment may lean harder on institutions to self-identify and remediate issues before they escalate.⁴

Fair Lending Exposure Beyond Federal Enforcement
Federal fair-lending supervision is expected to narrow substantially, including proposed changes curbing disparate-impact claims under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. But that does not eliminate fair-lending risk: state regulators, private litigants and reputational stakeholders can still pursue redlining, discouragement and disparate-treatment claims under state law and existing federal statutes. Examiners and counsel continue to closely monitor Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, marketing practices, and underwriting criteria.^{5, 6}

Open Banking, Data-Sharing, and a Patchwork of State Rules
Rulemaking related to Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act remains stalled and unenforceable at the federal level. But states like New York are moving to legislate their own data-sharing and consumer data rights frameworks. Institutions building or expanding data-sharing arrangements, fintech partnerships, or Application Programming Interface access should track state-level developments closely rather than falling victim to the façade of the federal pause.⁷

The CFPB’s retreat has not reduced the compliance perimeter — it has scattered it across more actors with less predictable coordination. Furthermore, loans originated during the current regulatory lull remain exposed to retroactive lookbacks and enforcement actions should a future administration shift federal priorities. Credit unions that keep their compliance infrastructure strong through this period will be far better positioned than those that quietly let it lapse.

The authors wish to thank Reese Martin and Ashleigh Szydlowski for their contributions to this article.

Footnotes:

1: “CFPB Guidance Tracker: Rescinded & Remaining,” Morgan Lewis (April 2, 2026).

2: “CFPB at the Crossroads: Enforcement Collapse, Supervision Gaps, and the State-Level Response,” Credit and Collection News (April 2026).

3: “What the CFPB’s Reduced Enforcement Means for Your Collections Firm in 2026,” HealPay (Feb. 19, 2026).

4: “CFPB at the Crossroads: Enforcement Collapse, Supervision Gaps, and the State-Level Response,” Credit and Collection News (April 2026).

5: “The Fair Lending Examination Playbook,” Premier Insights (August 21, 2025).

6: “The Fair Lending Self-Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide for 2026,” RATA Associates (March 2, 2026),

7: Adam Maarec, Joseph J. Schuster and John L. Culhane, Jr., “Open banking regulation in 2026: federal regulation resurfaces as states bring data sharing into focus,” Consumer Finance Monitor, Ballard Spahr LLP (June 26, 2026).