Meredith Fuchs has a long and impressive resume: She was chief counsel at Capital One. She helped build the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as chief of staff to its first director, Richard Cordray, and as deputy director and general counsel. She was chief investigative counsel for the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, where she led its investigation into the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Her first day at the CFPB was the day Cordray started.
"I was super excited because starting a government agency is an amazing thing," Fuchs said.
Now she leads Plaid's engagement with regulators on consumer data portability and has submitted detailed recommendations to the CFPB about its proposed rule that would execute section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act.
There are a few changes Fuchs would like to see made in the agency's proposed rule. For one thing, under the proposed rule, if a consumer wants to sign up with a fintech and authorizes their data to be accessed and shared, that data can only be used to provide the requested service, which is referred to as the primary purpose.
"There are a lot of totally mainstream, ordinary uses of data that benefit consumers such as fraud prevention or product improvement that would benefit from greater clarity by the CFPB," she said. And Fuchs would also like to see clearer risk management standards for data access platforms.
At Plaid, Fuchs oversees global legal, enterprise risk, compliance, privacy and policy and is secretary of the board. She's on the board of the Financial Technology Association, an advocacy organization for large fintechs like Plaid.
Outside of Plaid, she has supported legal services for low income and underrepresented communities through direct pro bono efforts and her service on the boards of the Legal Counsel for the Elderly, the D.C. Bar Foundation, the D.C. Bar Board of Governors and the D.C. Circuit Standing Committee on Pro Bono Services.
