The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) dropped a lawsuit against Capital One on Thursday (Feb. 27).
A Capital One spokesperson told PYMNTS in an emailed statement: “We welcome the CFPB’s decision to dismiss this action, which we strongly disputed.”
The CFPB announced the lawsuit in January, alleging that the bank cheated consumers out of interest payments on savings accounts, Reuters reported Thursday.
The CFPB did not immediately reply to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
In a Thursday post on X, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, said: “The CFPB was taking on Capital One for an alleged scheme cheating millions of consumers out of more than $2 billion in interest rates on savings accounts. But Trump and Musk have frozen that case.”
The CFPB dropped the lawsuit amid a broader withdrawal from such actions under the Trump administration that has seen the agency drop a case against student loan servicer Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA) on Thursday and a case against online lender SoLo Funds last week, according to the Reuters report.
The move came on the same day that President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the CFPB, Jonathan McKernan, appeared before a Senate confirmation hearing, the report said.
McKernan said during the hearing that the CFPB’s past enforcement actions have been excessive but that he would uphold the agency’s legal mandates, if confirmed, per the report.
The CFPB sued Capital One on Jan. 14, days before the Jan. 20 inauguration of Trump for his second term as president.
When announcing the lawsuit in a press release, the CFPB alleged that Capital One promoted one savings account as offering one of the nation’s “highest” interest rates at the same time it offered another one that paid out rates that were as much as 14 times higher.
“The CFPB is suing Capital One for cheating families out of billions of dollars on their savings accounts,” then-CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in the Jan. 14 press release.
Reached by PYMNTS at the time, Capital One said in an emailed statement that it “strongly” disagreed with the CFPB’s claims and would “vigorously defend” itself in court.
“Capital One is proud of its unique and industry-leading 360 suite of banking products, all of which offer great rates, carry no fees and no minimums, and have always been available in just minutes to all new and existing customers without any of the usual industry restrictions,” the bank said in its Jan. 14 statement.
Chopra was fired as CFPB director by Trump on Feb. 1.
