The Enforcer: Financial Protection Bureau’s Rohit Chopra Among 10 Policy Makers to Watch in 2022
- The 39-year-old Indian American is “proving to be one of the most influential financial regulators in the Biden administration.”
Indian American Rohit Chopra, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is among American Banker’s 10 policymakers to watch in 2022. The Manhattan-based trade publication covering the financial services industry says Chopra, 39, is “proving to be one of the most influential financial regulators in the Biden administration.”
On Sept. 30, the Senate voted 50-48 along party lines to confirm Chopra as head of the CFPB. He will serve a five-year term at the agency that helps consumer finance markets work by making regulations more effective, consistently and fairly enforcing rules, and empowering consumers to take more control over their economic lives.
A strong ally of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), he most recently served as a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. At the FTC, Chopra “pushed the agency to be more skeptical of private equity buyers and more aggressive in using its rule-making powers to rein in businesses,” Bloomberg reported.
Chopra now helps an agency he helped Warren set up after its establishment by the landmark Dodd-Frank financial reform law of 2010. He worked at the CFPB as an assistant director and student loan ombudsman. Before that, he was a special adviser to the secretary of education in the U.S. Department of Education in 2016 on loan servicing issues.
“Though he has been director of the CFPB for just over two months, he has already ordered six Big Tech firms to turn over information on their payment systems, warned of a crackdown on big banks’ illegal overdraft practices and urged state attorneys general to file more enforcement cases under federal law,” American Banker says. “The CFPB also settled a lending discrimination case against the $17 billion-asset Trustmark National Bank in Jackson, Miss., in concert with the Department of Justice,” it added.
Chopra received a B.A. from Harvard University and an MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He worked at McKinsey & Company from 2008 to 2010 in the financial services, healthcare, and consumer technology sectors.