FTC provides annual ECOA summary to CFPB

Federal Issues FTC Enforcement CFPB ECOA Fair Lending Artificial Intelligence Regulation B

On February 3, the FTC announced it recently provided the CFPB with its annual summary of work on ECOA-related policy issues, focusing specifically on the Commission’s activities with respect to Regulation B during 2020. The summary discusses, among other things, the following FTC research and policy development initiatives:

• The FTC submitted a comment letter in response to the CFPB’s request for information on ways to provide additional clarity under ECOA (covered by InfoBytes here). Among other things, the FTC noted that Regulation B explicitly incorporates disparate impact and offered suggestions should the Bureau choose to provide additional detail regarding its approach to disparate impact analysis. The FTC also urged the Bureau to remind entities offering credit to small businesses that ECOA and Regulation B may apply based “on the facts and circumstances involved” and that entities cannot avoid application of these statutes based solely on how they characterize a transaction or the benefits they claim to provide.
• The FTC hosted the 13th Annual FTC Microeconomics Conference, which focused on the use of machine-learning algorithms when making decisions in areas such as credit access.
• The FTC’s Military Task Force continued to work on military consumer protection issues, including military consumers’ “rights to various types of notifications as applicants for credit, including for adverse action, and information about the anti-discrimination provisions, in ECOA and Regulation B.”
• The FTC continued to participate in the Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending, along with the CFPB, DOJ, HUD, and the federal banking regulatory agencies. The Commission also joined the newly formed Interagency Fair Lending Methodologies Working Group with the aforementioned agencies in order “to coordinate and share information on analytical methodologies used in enforcement of and supervision for compliance with fair lending laws, including ECOA.”

The summary also highlights FTC ECOA enforcement actions, business and consumer education efforts on fair lending issues, as well as blog posts discussing fair lending safeguards and the use of artificial intelligence in automated decision-making.