Identify who are your subject matter experts are, engage them early, and start working on all the first day presentations – that’s the advice Richard Miller, director of compliance at Hyundai Capital America, gave on how to prepare for Consumer Financial Protection Bureau exams.
Miller, along with Toyota Financial Services’ Chief Compliance Officer Linda Iannone, gave advice on copping with CFPB exams while speaking at the Auto Finance Risk & Compliance Summit in May.
First step: interview your employees, Iannone said.
“We were doing a practice interview with one of our collection reps, and the question was, “tell us about the training that you receive’ and the person said, ‘Training? We don’t get any training.’ And the most ironic thing about it is, this person had taken Fair Debt Collections Practice training,” she said. “So it told us that we need to do a better job of making a connection between the training they’re taking and their day-to-day responsibilities.”
Role-playing with employees can be enlightening, Miller said, especially when determining how each department should be represented, if or when the CFPB comes knocking.
“You learn that a person who’s really good at their job — high level executives — are really poor speakers for examinations, and you need to understand that going in,” he told attendees. “They may not be the best person to represent that area, even though they’re in charge, it can be a real mess.”
Hear more advice from Miller and Iannone in the video below – the first in our four-part video series on Coping with Exams: