ABA Bank Compliance - July/August 2019

it chose, as long as it provided all the necessary information). Standardization makes it easy to drop the information into a spreadsheet, or statistical data analytics package, to analyze to one’s heart’s content. It’s much easier now to explore what any bank out there may be doing. [Note: the CFPB recently removed its free data analytics tool from its website, saying it was outdated due to not being able to analyze all the new data points. It is unknown at present whether a revised tool will take its place, but the lack of a tool from the CFPB does not eliminate the ability of anyone to analyze the data using tools as simple as a spreadsheet.]

2. You will no longer even know who has accessed your data and is analyzing it.

At least in the days of being asked for
your modified LAR, you had an idea
who might be doing something with
it, and you could prepare accordingly.
Now you don’t, and therefore you
must be ready for anything.

What Information
Has Been Made Public?

Due to legitimate privacy concerns, the CFPB took great care in considering which of the new 2018 data elements should be made publicly available. After all, if all the data were released into the public domain, it had been shown possible to identify individual consumers since so much data was available. That meant credit scores, property addresses, and other information could be pinpointed to individual consumers, which all agreed is not a good outcome.

So in final guidance issued on De-
cember 28, 2018, the CFPB announced
that the following data elements would
not be released with banks’ modified
LAR information:

■ ■ ■ The Universal loan identifier or nonuniversal loan-identifier;

■ ■ ■ Application date;

■ ■ ■ Action taken date;

■ ■ ■ Property address;

■ ■ ■ Credit score relied upon in making the credit decision;

■ ■ ■ Mortgage loan originator NMLSR identifier (from the SAFE Act);

■ ■ ■ Result generated by an AUS ( Automated Underwriting System), if one was used; and

■ ■ ■ Information in free-form text fields for race, ethnicity, the name and version of any credit scoring model used, the reason for denial, and the name of AUS.

In addition, the following data points were released in modified format, to “reduce the precision” of the information so that exact values can’t be ascertained from the data: