Moving the Metal

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In this episode of Moving the Metal: The Auto Finance Podcast, hosts Brooke Conkle and Chris Capurso break down a recent DOJ/U.S. Attorney’s Office settlement with a lease-here, pay-here dealership over violations of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA). They discuss the two provisions at the heart of the case, repossession protections and lease termination rights, and the way a dealer’s failure to check military status and refund lease payments led to a $137,348 penalty and a robust, DOJ-approved compliance overhaul. Brooke and Chris explain why SCRA enforcement remains a bipartisan, well-funded priority (nearly $500 million recovered since 2011) and offer practical steps dealers and auto finance companies should take now, including mandatory DMDC database searches, documented military-orders intake procedures, thorough recordkeeping, and designated, trained SCRA points of contact. Tune in for a real-world roadmap of what regulators expect dealership compliance programs to look like.

In this episode of Moving the Metal: The Auto Finance Podcast, hosts Brooke Conkle and Chris Capurso break down a recent $4 million settlement between the FTC and the Connecticut Attorney General’s Office against an auto dealership accused of deceptive pricing, unauthorized add-on charges, and phantom vehicle certifications. They discuss the significance of naming individual owners and managers as defendants, the growing coordination between federal and state regulators using UDAP authority to enforce what amounts to the “ghost” of the vacated FTC CARS Rule, and why junk fees, price transparency, and express informed consent remain top enforcement priorities regardless of administration. The hosts close with practical takeaways for dealers and finance companies on aligning advertising, add-on sales practices, and compliance monitoring to avoid similar exposure, including private litigation risk under state consumer protection statutes and the Holder Rule.

In this episode of Moving the Metal: The Auto Finance Podcast, hosts Brooke Conkle and Chris Capurso break down California’s CARS Act, set to take effect October 1. They trace the law’s roots back to the FTC’s now-overturned CARS Rule, walk through its four core compliance pillars (misrepresentations, total price disclosures, valueless add-ons, and recordkeeping), and dig into the new three-day right to cancel for used vehicles. The hosts also cover enforcement risk under California’s UCL and CLRA, the exposure lenders face through the Holder Rule, and five practical steps dealers and their partners should be taking right now to get ahead of the law’s arrival.

In this crossover edition of Moving the Metal: The Auto Finance Podcast and The Consumer Finance Podcast, hosts Brooke Conkle, Chris Capurso, and Chris Willis break down the FTC’s policy statement abandoning disparate impact enforcement under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Section 5 of the FTC Act. The group traces the reversal to two key drivers — a reassessment of the FTC’s statutory authority and President Trump’s executive order directing agencies to deprioritize disparate impact liability — while placing the move in the broader context of similar rollbacks at the CFPB and federal banking regulators. They also examine what remaining exposure looks like at the state level, particularly in New York and New Jersey, and close with a clear message for compliance officers: fair lending is far from dead, the current federal retreat is best understood as a vacation rather than a permanent reprieve, and paying close attention to regulatory signals now can be a meaningful competitive advantage down the road.

In this episode of Moving the Metal, hosts Brooke Conkle and Chris Capurso break down the FTC’s landmark policy statement officially abandoning disparate impact enforcement and what it means for dealers and auto finance companies. They cover the agency’s two core justifications — statutory authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act and ECOA, and President Trump’s executive order on meritocracy — and explain why, despite the federal reprieve, companies should not treat this as a green light to abandon fair lending compliance programs altogether. From the compliance side, Chris walks through the careful recalibration businesses should consider, while Brooke flags that pending litigation and active state-level efforts to codify disparate impact liability mean the risk landscape is far from clear. The episode closes with a preview of Part 2, where the hosts will be joined by Chris Willis to dig deeper into the history and future of fair lending law.

In this episode of Moving the Metal: The Auto Finance Podcast, hosts Brooke Conkle and Chris Capurso break down a recent New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) enforcement action against a Bronx dealership, covering the violations that led to nearly $130,000 in civil penalties and consumer restitution, the compliance and litigation takeaways for dealers and lenders, and what the appointment of a former FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection director to lead the DCWP signals for the future of city and state-level auto finance enforcement.

In this mid-year roundup episode of Moving the Metal: The Auto Finance Podcast, hosts Brooke Conkle and Chris Capurso recap the biggest developments shaping the auto finance industry in the first half of 2026, including the FTC’s widely unexpected “Notorious 97” warning letters to nearly 100 dealers, a wave of state-level UDAP enforcement actions, Senator Elizabeth Warren’s data requests targeting repossession and service member lending practices, Kentucky’s new legislative framework for GAP and vehicle financial protection products, a significant New Jersey dealer enforcement action under the state’s Consumer Fraud Act, and the growing compliance risks around fraud detection and AI use in the sales and financing process — wrapping up with a look ahead at what the second half of the year may bring.

In this episode of Moving the Metal: The Auto Finance Podcast, hosts Brooke Conkle and Chris Capurso break down two significant state-level regulatory responses to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) March 2026 wave of 97 warning letters targeting auto dealers — examining how Louisiana’s Motor Vehicle Commission is formally updating its advertising regulations to align with FTC guidance on total price transparency, and how the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office issued a sweeping advisory putting dealers on notice that hidden documentation fees violate state law, with potential double exposure under both motor vehicle dealer regulations and the Massachusetts UDAP statute.

In this crossover episode of Payments Pros and Regulatory Oversight, Stephen Piepgrass and Keith Barnett provide an update on the fast-developing prediction markets landscape. They discuss how federal and state regulators are responding to the growth of event contracts and the legal questions surrounding this emerging market. The conversation highlights the CFTC’s continued focus on oversight, market integrity, and the need for platforms to maintain strong controls to detect and prevent manipulation or other improper trading activity.