Under the leadership of Rohit Chopra, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has continued its aggressive stance toward “modern-day redlining,” according to Richard Horn, former CFPB senior counsel and special advisor and now co-managing partner of Garris Horn LLP.
“So, what is modern-day redlining? I call it marketing discrimination because that’s really what it is,” Horn said. “Marketing discrimination or your ‘modern-day redlining’ doesn’t involve how a lender treats any particular applicant. It’s all about where the institution is marketing.”
“It’s really an extension of ECOA to impose an affirmative requirement to target marketing to every single demographic in your market area. That’s the way that agencies view this,” Horn said. “For the CFPB, the only fair lending law that they enforce is [ECOA]. The Dodd- Frank Act didn’t give them authority over any other fair lending law, like the Fair Housing Act.”
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