Ragin’ against the regulators

Of course Richard Hunt would identify as a “Ragin’ Cajun.” The Louisiana heritage of the president and CEO of the Consumer Bankers Association (CBA) is evident from the first moment he opens his mouth.

A graduate of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette — better known by its unique mascot, the Ragin’ Cajuns — Hunt displays his passion and his bayou accent for all to hear.

{mosads}As effectively the face of retail banking in Washington, Hunt has emerged as perhaps the industry’s primary opposing force to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and a leading antagonist of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

“She’s tapped into the angry America,” Hunt said. “There are some people who are just angry.”

And with the elections finally here, he is preparing the banking industry for what could come if Warren and Democrats take control of the Senate.

“The monthly hearings schedule would be brutal. They’re going to try and scrutinize every single product we have,” he told The Hill in an interview earlier this month. “We’ll be proud to defend our banking industry.”

Hunt cut his teeth early on in the political sphere, starting out back home in Louisiana as driver for former Rep. Jim McCrery (R), eventually working his way up to Washington as chief of staff before McCrery retired in 2008. Hunt was a marketing major in college, but he said the political life is never too far away in Louisiana.

“In Louisiana, you’re born into politics,” he said.

In 2001, he hopped over to the Securities Industry Association, now known as the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. There he helped the group lobby on retirement, tax and other financial issues until he jumped over to take the reins at the CBA in 2009.

In the shadow of the financial crisis, Hunt knew the coming years would be a rocky time for the banking industry as Washington looked to respond. But what this longtime legislative expert did not anticipate was that many of his days would come to be dominated by a new regulator: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Created in 2010 by the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, the CFPB was a regulator unlike any other: one created solely to monitor how average Americans interact with the financial world and crack down on tactics it finds unfair or abusive.

Given that the CBA’s work begins and ends at the point where banks interact with their customers, the group quickly became the primary industry voice on nearly everything the new agency did.

Hunt has described the agency’s record as “mixed” and says he regularly interacts with the bureau’s director, Richard Cordray.

“I told him when he started, I would not be his best friend, nor would I be his worst enemy,” said Hunt.

And one of the CBA’s top priorities is overhauling the CFPB to replace Cordray’s director position with a bipartisan commission. Congressional Republicans have repeatedly pushed for such an approach, but Democrats have resisted every effort to rework the agency, arguing it would only weaken it.

“Until that is changed, you will continue to see the CFPB made into a political football,” Hunt said.

Specifically, Hunt said the CBA is aiming to carve out a niche to represent banks right around or above $10 billion in assets — that’s the threshold that determines whether the CFPB directly examines a financial institution.

Eight years after the bank bailout, the financial industry is still struggling to regain its reputation among the American public. And the surprising strength of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) Democratic presidential run, and eventual nominee Hillary Clinton’s desire to win over the “Warren Wing” of the party, show that anti-bank sentiment is still a potent political force.

“Once a month I revisit the bank bailout vote. … I still believe it was the right thing to do,” said Hunt. “But for banks’ reputations, it was the worst vote to ever ask for.”

And for retail banking in particular, the industry took a big hit after the regulators nailed Wells Fargo with a massive government settlement after the bank admitted that employees created millions of fake accounts in order to hit sales targets.

The settlement invoked bipartisan outrage in Washington, shook up leadership at the bank and placed retail banking under an intense microscope.

“Yeah, that hurt us. It’s just another hurdle that we’re going to have to overcome,” Hunt said. “Everything we have heard from Director Cordray is … it is an isolated case.”

Currently, Hunt has the dual jobs of fighting back against Washington efforts the industry dislikes and trying to push the banking industry forward in a way that wins over its customers.

A major part of that effort is pressing new technology to help banks keep up with other high-tech parts of the average American’s day.

“It’s our mission at CBA to navigate retail banks into the 21st century, that 99 percent of banking can be done on our smartphone,” he said. “They have had to put their head down and just deal with compliance of Dodd-Frank, and the entire world changed around them.”

Since the crisis, the CBA has grown alongside Washington’s interest in the banking industry. The staff has nearly tripled, from 11 to 30, and the majority of CBA staffers are women. The group has also doubled its revenue under Hunt.

But despite that growth and the looming challenges facing the industry, Hunt is always a joke away from home.

One of the CBA’s top priorities for 2017 is clearing a product with regulators that would allow banks to compete with payday lenders for short-term loans. In discussing that effort, Hunt said that he has seen a swath of payday lenders open in his hometown of Jennings, La. He also mentioned Jennings happens to be the parish seat of Jefferson Davis Parish.

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“Note, I didn’t say county. I said parish,” joked Hunt. “It’s the rest of the world is backwards.”