The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced the appointment of new members to four of its advisory boards including the Consumer Advisory Board (CAB), Community Bank Advisory Council (CBAC), Credit Union Advisory Council (CUAC), and Academic Research Council (ARC). They will advise CFPB leadership on issues related to both market trends and emerging consumer financial issues.
The appointments, announced Wednesday by CFPB Director Kathleen Kraninger, include 11 new members of the CAB led by Chair Eric Kaplan; eight new members of CBAC including chair Valerie Quiett; eight new members of CUAC including Chair Racardo McLaughlin; and seven new members of the ARC including Chair Joshua Wright.
New CAB Chair Eric Kaplan serves as director of the housing finance program at the Milken Institute in Washington, D.C., while CBAC Chair Valerie Quiett is SVP and chief legal officer at Mechanics and Farmers Bank in Durham, N.C. CUAC Chair Racardo McLaughlin is VP of mortgage originations/operations at TwinStar Credit Union in Lacey, Wash., while ARC Chair Joshua Wright is a professor at the Scalia Law School at George Mason University in Arlington, Va.
This is the latest move made by Kraninger after a spring 2019 announcement in which she directed the Bureau to “enhance” its charters concerning advisory committees, which provide information to the bureau on a number of different business sectors that the agency oversees. Beginning in the 2020 fiscal year, the committees expanded their collective focus to broader matters of policy.
“In spring 2019, Director Kraninger announced a series of enhancements to the Bureau’s advisory committee charters, including: expanding the focus of the meetings to cover broad policy matters; increasing the frequency of in-person meetings from two times a year to three times a year for the CAB, CBAC, and CUAC; elevating the ARC to a Director-level advisory committee and increasing its meeting frequency; and increasing term lengths from one year to two years, among other enhancements,” the Bureau reiterated in its announcement of the new appointments.
In early summer of 2018, then-acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney notably fired all the members of the CFPB’s Consumer Advisory Board, reportedly as a cost-saving measure and to “streamline” their memberships. The intent at the time was to “reconstitute” the CAB at a later date. The following September, the agency announced a new Consumer Advisory Board, which operated under the existing conditions of the Dodd-Frank Act.
Director Kraninger ascended to her position at the head of the agency in late 2018 after being nominated to the post by President Donald Trump. Kraninger expressed support for a U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the single director structure of the agency she leads as unconstitutional. The Court ruled in June that it agreed with that contention, though stopped short of invalidating the agency at-large.
Read the press release detailing the Bureau’s new appointments and the full advisory committees’ rosters at the CFPB Newsroom website.
