Deep Dive into Consumer Finance

Introduction: A Deep Dive into Lending

August 12, 2025

The landscape of unsecured lending continues to evolve rapidly, shaped by emerging technologies, shifting consumer expectations, and an increasingly complex regulatory environment. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and other regulators remain focused on issues such as underwriting innovations, consumer protections, and enforcement risks — all of which impact lenders of every size.

For businesses operating in this space, understanding the nuances of underwriting, application processes, and compliance challenges is critical. How are new technologies reshaping borrower interactions? What regulatory risks should lenders be watching closely? And how can lenders strike the right balance between innovation and consumer protection?

Over the coming weeks, McGlinchey attorneys across multiple practice groups will take a deep dive into lending — offering insightful articles, podcasts, and webinars tailored for busy professionals. Whether you’re a lender, servicer, or legal advisor, our content will break down key topics like underwriting trends, regulatory updates, error resolution, and consumer engagement strategies.

Hear from Aaron Kouhoupt (Cleveland), McGlinchey’s Chief Privacy Officer and a Member of our Financial Institutions Compliance Team, as he discusses this fascinating and vibrant subject matter while giving you a breakdown of the content you can expect in the coming weeks.

Aaron Kouhoupt: I’d like to welcome you back to our Deep Dive Series, where we spend a few weeks delving into specific topics and providing short, topical presentations that highlight different things that you might want to be thinking about from an in-house perspective. I am Aaron Kouhoupt. I’m a partner in the Cleveland office here at McGlinchey Stafford. I am a consumer finance lawyer who focuses primarily on lending and payment products and a whole bunch of other things. For those of you who know me, I spent a whole lot of time in-house in my career, and so I have been there thinking through these topics and working with businesses, and this series is really designed to help you navigate those waters in a relatively quick and efficient manner.

This time we are going to be talking about lending. What is lending, maybe most importantly today, is what is not lending. We’re seeing a lot of different products, a lot of different discussions amongst regulators and courts about just what lending is and what it means to have a loan that is subject to federal or state law. What is a loan? What is not a loan? Why does it matter? Which regulatory considerations do you need to be thinking about, if it is and if it isn’t, and does it matter which regulation you’re talking about when you’re thinking about what it means to be credit, what it means to be a loan product? We’re also going to talk about a couple of different areas, like auto lending, student lending, which has obviously been a hot topic for a long time and continues to be.

We are also going to spend a little bit of time discussing mortgage and manufactured housing issues, which is something that we haven’t done in this series yet.

As with our other deep dive series, we’re going to mix things up and have some shorter podcasts, some webinars, and some written content. So, please stay tuned. We’re excited to have you join us.