The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s recently released fall 2013 rulemaking agenda portends aggressive rulemaking by the Bureau in 2014.

With most of the rulemaking mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act now completed, the agenda reflects the CFPB’s plans to focus on consumer products and services other than mortgages. Most notably, the CFPB’s rulemaking plans include:

• Prerule activities concerning payday loans and deposit advance products targeted for March 2014 and overdraft programs targeted for July 2014. We anticipate that the CFPB will issue additional "white papers" summarizing its research and analysis of these products within these time frames and perhaps issue advance notices of proposed rulemaking.
• A proposed regulation concerning prepaid cards targeted for May 2014.
• Another rule to define "larger participants" in markets for consumer financial products and services (which we expect to address the auto finance market). The agenda includes target dates of November 2013 and July 2014 for, respectively, a proposed and final regulation. Given that no such proposal is currently pending, the CFPB’s target dates could suggest that a proposal is imminent.
• Debt collection regulations, with the development of possible regulations targeted to begin after February 10, 2014, when the comment period closes on the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking issued by the CFPB in November 2013. The ANPR solicited comments on an array of issues relating to the debt collection practices of third-party debt collectors and debt buyers as well as those of creditors collecting their own debts. (For more information on the ANPR, see our prior legal alert.)
• In the mortgage arena, development of regulations to implement the Dodd-Frank provisions expanding the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act’s data collection requirements (targeted to begin in February 2014) and consideration of further refinements to the mortgage rules that take effect in January 2014 (with such consideration targeted to begin in June 2014).
• As part of the CFPB’s regulatory streamlining initiative, development of a proposed rule that would eliminate the requirement in Regulation P (which implements the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) to deliver annual privacy notices at least when a company limits sharing with third parties and there has been no change in the company’s privacy policy (targeted to begin in January 2014).