The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is a U.S. government agency that helps consumer finance markets work by:
- Making rules more effective
- Consistently and fairly enforcing those rules
- Empowering consumers to take more control over their economic lives.
Some recent enforcement actions taken by the agency have involved for-profit colleges. The CFPB determined that these colleges deceived their students into taking out loans that cost more than advertised or steered them into taking certain loans to boost school revenue. To support the enforcement action, the CFPB's technology staff created a tool that gives personalized interactive financial aid offer information for students trying to borrow money at these schools.
The tool also provides school graduation and loan default rates, potential salaries for their programs, and information about post-graduation budgeting. This talk describes the tool, the reasons for its creation, and the tactics used to design and deliver the tool to students. As part of these schools’ legal settlements with the CFPB, it’s now mandatory that students trying to borrow money to attend the colleges must use and complete this tool before they can enroll.
About
Naa Marteki Reed is a UX designer, user researcher, Agile scrum master, and front-end web developer for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The CFPB is a U.S. government agency that makes sure banks, lenders, and other financial companies treat you fairly. As of April 2017, she has worked on web projects at the CFPB related to planning for retirement, consumer complaints, paying for college, consumer credit trends, and compliance examinations. She's very glad to return to MidwestUX after speaking here at the 2014 conference. She lives in Oak Park, IL.