Federal Consumer Protection Regulation: Disclosures and Beyond

The symposium brought together credit card industry leaders, legal scholars, consumer advocates, economists, and federal regulators to discuss standardized credit card disclosures and other means of protecting credit card consumers. This paper summarizes the day’s discussion and details the recommendations of symposium participants. In general, these recommendations involve (1) making specific changes to current credit card disclosures, (2) improving the processes by which disclosures are implemented, (3) increasing reliance on technology for the purposes of making disclosures more useful and educating consumers, and (4) changing the “mix” of regulatory intervention in the industry. The paper concludes that while many participants do not expect significant improvements to existing federal consumer protections, there is evidence that standardized credit disclosures, when coupled with other regulatory tools, serve a segment of credit-card-using consumers well and could incrementally benefit from modification.