June 15, 2015 - New York Times - Goldman Sachs has spent 146 years largely as the bank of the powerful and privileged. Now the Wall Street powerhouse is working on a new business line: providing loans that can help you consolidate your credit card debt or remodel your kitchen.

While the new consumer lending unit is still in the early planning stages, Goldman has ambitious plans to offer loans of a few thousand dollars to ordinary Americans and compete with Main Street banks and other lenders.

June 15, 2015 - International Business Times - Law enforcement officials don't like it when debt collectors pretend to be cops in order to get consumers to pay them. Case in point: federal and state regulators earlier this year sued a Buffalo, New York, firm after collectors allegedly made numerous false threats to debtors and identified themselves on phone calls with pseudonyms such as “Detective Jeff Ramsay” and “Investigator Kearns.”

Last month, the Federal Trade Commission won a temporary restraining order against an outfit operating approximately 15 miles north of Buffalo in North Tonawanda, New York. The collectors in that case, the suit alleges, claimed to be calling from “The State Officials' Office,” and threatened to dispatch a “uniformed officer” to consumers’ homes or offices, as well as advised them to “secure any large animals or firearms on the premises.”

May 26, 2015 - ACA International - The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has once again updated its regulatory agenda, including its plans for regulating the debt collection industry. The CFPB's recently released spring 2015 Regulatory Agenda is a voluntary update in conjunction with a broader initiative led by the Office of Management and Budget to publish a Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions across the federal government. Portions of the Unified Agenda will be published in the Federal Register, and the full set of materials is now available online.

In addition to debt collection activities, major initiatives involve mortgages, prepaid financial products, payday and other similar loans, overdraft services, defining auto lending larger participants and arbitration. The agenda categorizes rulemaking actions by stage as pre-rule, proposed rule, final rule, long term actions, or completed actions. The next semi-annual agenda, typically released in the fall, will reflect the results of further prioritization and planning.

April 21, 2015 - Forbes.com - For years, FICO credit scores have played a disproportionate role in our lives. FICO, which is used by 90% of lenders in America, determines whether or not we can be approved for a mortgage, auto loan or credit card. It is also used to determine how much we can borrow, and what interest rate we will have to pay if we are approved.

FICO uses data from credit bureaus to assign borrowers a score between 300 and 850. The best scores are given to people who always pay on time, have limited credit card debt and no negative collections activity, judgments or previous bankruptcy filings. People lose the most points for missing payments, receiving collection items or filing bankruptcy.