Rohit Chopra, the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, doesn’t appear to be fazed by last week’s Supreme Court hearing that could alter the future of the agency he helms, and continues to push an aggressive agenda, going as far on Friday as to compare how the lines between payments and commerce are blurring here in the United States and moving closer to a structure like the one that is currently in use in China.
Chopra separately had high praise for Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar on Friday, who represented the CFPB before the Supreme Court, and said the Bureau “is going to continue to do its work on medical debt, on data privacy when it comes to our transactions, to junk fees, and so much more.”
The CFPB remains on track to release its proposed open banking rule later this month, which aims to give consumers more control over their financial information and how it is used by institutions in the financial services industry. The rule is also aimed at allowing consumers to more easily switch providers from one company to the next.
In a speech at the Brookings Institution on Friday, Chopra said he fears “that the U.S. is lurching toward a consolidated market structure like the one that has emerged in China that blurs the lines between payments and commerce and creates the incentives for excessive surveillance and even financial censorship.”
The surveillance and financial censorship is conflating banking and traditional commercial activities, Chopra said in a separate interview. That may come in the form of restricting how payment processors can “harvest, surveil, and monetize” consumers’ personal data, Chopra said. “It’s worrisome when we don’t have a real open and decentralized system that consumers and businesses and new types of startups in the financial sector can all use to get ahead. So we’re going to be continuing to look really carefully at how that data harvesting and surveillance is working.”
