The New Fighter At the CFPB

Rohit Chopra wants to know more about tech companies’ plans for financial products

- Akayla Gardner

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been a flashpoint in partisan politics and a focus of Wall Street’s ire since its inception a decade ago. Now the watchdog, which was created in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to protect Americans from fraud and other abuses, has a new target: Big Tech.

Less than two months into his tenure as CFPB director, Rohit Chopra, who was formerly with the Federal Trade Commission, is laying the groundwork for greater scrutiny of Amazon.com, Apple, Facebook parent Meta Platforms, Google parent Alphabet, and other technology giants. The industry has been moving into consumer payments and other businesses traditionally dominated by banks and other financial-services companies.

Politically, Chopra is making a safe bet. Big Tech is a popular villain in Washington among Democrats and Republicans alike. And his record of taking on big business in antitrust fights at the FTC makes him a viable threat to Silicon Valley’s finance ambitions. At the CFPB, Chopra has significant authority to pursue lawsuits and write new rules. “We cannot have a two-tier system where financial institutions have to play by the rules, [and] where Facebook and other tech companies using mysterious black-box algorithms get to skate off with no accountability,” Chopra said on Oct. 28 in his first testimony as CFPB director before the Senate Banking Committee.

The CFPB was sidelined by the Trump administration. For a while it was essentially led part time by Mick Mulvaney, who was also the White House budget director and a longtime critic of the agency. Enforcement actions were scaled back. Now progressive Democrats and consumer advocates are looking to Chopra—a protégé of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who helped conceive the agency—to make the regulator relevant again.