In an effort to strengthen financial firm regulations and to better detect premature signs of fraud, Chicago will report predatory and deceptive lending activity directly to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Mortgage News reported Dec. 6. Chicago is the first city to do so. 

CFPB Director Richard Cordray and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel jointly announced the new reporting strategy Dec. 5 at a Chicago press conference. Cordray said he expected this arrangement to be the first of many and called upon other cities to move in the same direction.

“We want to know what you are seeing and how that can inform what we should be doing — where our supervision and enforcement teams should focus their attention, and what problems our policymakers should undertake to fix,” Cordray said, National Mortgage News reported. “For us, this is a leading example … to say to other cities you should be doing what Chicago is doing.”

Mayor Emanuel said that the city has proposed three ordinances that relate to regulating and licensing, and that the city and the CFPB specifically will target financial companies that prey on low- to middle-income families, military personnel and seniors.

“The upshot is that predatory lending hurts more than its immediate targets; it assaults the very foundations of stable communities,” Cordray said, National Mortgage News reported. “The damage can take years and years to repair, as we are finding.”