Motivated Banks
Michael Mallow, a finance lawyer with Loeb & Loeb LLC in Los Angeles, said banks are motivated to make changes because the agency directly supervises them and could use consumer complaints in enforcement actions.
The consumer bureau “will find you anyway, so you might as well get ahead of the game,” Mallow said in an interview.
Warren’s early efforts to publicize the bureau and its work are a big reason that complaints about credit cards are coming in at a pace averaging nearly 1,000 per month, said Jo Ann Barefoot, a consultant with Treliant Risk Advisers.
“Elizabeth Warren pulled all of this over into popular culture, and what we’re seeing now is the effects of that,” Barefoot said in an interview.