New bank rules should make it easier to switch

I haven't seen anything about court battles over this. Maybe the big banks are more or less OK with it.

It’s about to get harder for banks to hold onto unsatisfied customers — and their money.

It has long been a challenge for people to ditch the banks where they keep their checking accounts. Blame tricky data transfer processes, lengthy and time-consuming requests, and other hurdles. But the first so-called open banking rules in the U.S. aims to change that.

New rules finalized by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) on Tuesday will require banks to simplify how customers transfer their data from one bank to another without losing their transaction and bill history.

The aim of the regulations, formally known as 1033, is to empower consumers by giving them unprecedented control over their financial data, including who to share it with and when. As a result, customers will be able to direct their bank to move their account to a competing one with ease and use third-party applications with just the click of a button — all without paying a fee.

“Imagine being able to switch banks as easily as switching streaming services,” said James McCarthy, a founding member of the CFPB who is now chairman of financial services solutions firm McCarthy Hatch. “That’s what it’s really going to be like.” - Quartz

Holding up students for their transcripts

This has been going on for too long. Should never have been able to happen at all.

Colleges that lend directly to their students cannot later refuse to release students’ transcripts as a way of forcing them to make payments, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced on (September 29), calling the practice “abusive” and a violation of federal law.

The loans made directly by a college, rather than a traditional lender, are used to pay for classes, but they don’t come with the same protections as federal student loans do. Hundreds of thousands of students at for-profit colleges have taken these loans, known as institutional loans, and some public and nonprofit institutions also offer them.

The consumer bureau’s ruling was aimed at stopping the colleges from withholding transcripts from students who haven’t repaid the debt. Some colleges refuse to release a student’s transcript until the full amount has been repaid, even when even when students had entered into a payment plan and is making regular payments. - Hechinger Report

SCOTUS taking up CFPB case is not what you may have feared

Anyway, it’s certainly not what I feared, when I first saw the headlines.

Nerves frayed among progressive judiciary watchers on Friday afternoon as the Supreme Court announced plans to take up Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This case will decide whether the bureau’s leadership structure, in which a single director can only be removed by the president for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” is constitutional...

Everyone expects that the Court will follow Kavanaugh’s lead from 2016, and will grant the president the power to fire the CFPB director for any reason. But this could be a very positive step in the current context. It would mean that an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders (or likely any Democratic) administration wouldn’t be stuck with anti-regulatory director Kathy Kraninger in place until December 2023. - The American Prospect

Concerns that the radical-right brigade on SCOTUS might take this as an opportunity to quash the CFPB, and even Dodd-Frank, entirely, are addressed later in the article.