The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau yesterday announced the newest round of appointments to its Consumer Advisory Board, Community Bank Advisory Counsel, Credit Union Advisory Counsel, and Academic Research Council, and once again, the accounts receivable management industry is on the outside looking in.
As with previous iterations of the Consumer Advisory Board, this one is heavily laden with consumer advocates and barely any representation from the financial services industry. The members of the new Consumer Advisory Board are:
- Scott E. Dewald, President and Chief Executive Officer, REI Oklahoma (Durant, Okla.)
- Chelsie Evans Enos, Executive Director, Hawaiian Community Assets (Honolulu)
- Thomas Okuda Fitzpatrick, Executive Director, Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia – HOME of VA (Richmond, Va.)
- Stephen A. Gardner, President and Executive Director, Clarifi (Philadelphia)
- Cashauna Hill, Executive Director, The Redress Movement (New Orleans)
- Nick Mitchell-Bennett, Executive Director, cdcb | come dream. come build (Brownsville, Texas)
- Amy Nelson, Executive Director, Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana (Indianapolis)
- Denise Notice-Scott, President, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) (New York)
- Fern Orie, Chief Executive Officer, The Matriarch Group (Green Bay, Wisc.)
- Angeles Ortega, CEO, Mi Casa Resource Center (Denver)
- Juan Bonilla Santiago, Vice President, Economic Inclusion and Wealth Building, United Way of Massachusetts Bay (Boston)
- Shanelle Smith Whigham, SVP, National Community Engagement Director, KeyBank (Cleveland)
- Sam Walls III, CEO, Arkansas Capital Corporation (Little Rock, Ark.)
A member of the ARM industry has not been on the Consumer Advisory Board in more than five years. Back then, Ohad Samet from TrueAccord was named to the CAB, but Mick Mulvaney, then the Acting Director of the Bureau, fired all 25 members of the Board and disbanded it. The CAB was brought back later in the year, and has been filled with individuals mostly from consumer advocacy groups ever since.
The current version of the Board doesn’t have much in the way of representation from the financial services industry. Shanelle Smith Whigham is from KeyBank, and Sam Walls III and Scott Dewald both run organizations that seem to provide some funding to consumers, but all the remaining members work at consumer advocacy groups.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act mandates that the CFPB maintain a Consumer Advisory Board to provide advice on consumer finance issues. Members represent the 12 districts of the Federal Reserve System and mist be recommended by a president of a Federal Reserve Bank.
Members of the Board serve a two-year term.
