On April 15, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a final rule suspending for one year the requirement under the Truth in Lending Act and implemented by Regulation Z that credit card issuers submit their card agreements to the CFPB on a quarterly basis.  The CFPB publishes the agreements to a public database on its website.

Other requirements, including card issuers’ obligations to post these agreements on their own websites, will remain unaffected by the rule.  The CFPB says that during the suspension period it intends to manually compile credit card agreements from issuer websites and make them available to consumers on the CFPB’s website.   According to the CFPB, this will help ensure that the database contains agreement terms that are currently offered to consumers by credit card issuers responsible for the substantial majority of existing and new credit cards in the United States.

The final rule adopts the February 2015 proposed rule and took effect immediately upon its April 17, 2015 publication in the Federal Register.

“Today we are finalizing a rule that will help further the Bureau’s work to improve the public credit card agreements database,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray.  “Updating and streamlining the process for how credit card companies submit their agreements to us can benefit industry and our agency.  Improving this process can also enable consumers and others to access the data faster and in a more useable form.”

Credit card issuers must resume submitting credit card agreements on a quarterly basis starting April 30, 2016.