A senior official at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau told lawmakers on Thursday that the bureau’s reliance on a limited study of payday lenders was not strong enough to support strict underwriting requirements of small-dollar loans.
Thomas Pahl, the CFPB’s policy associate director for research, markets and regulations, defended the agency’s overhaul of its 2017 payday rule, announced earlier this year, by claiming the study the CFPB relied upon to impose tough ability-to-repay standards did not address vehicle title loans and was limited to data collected from one payday lender in five states.
