For years, American financial companies have fought the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the chief U.S. consumer finance watchdog — in the courts and media, portraying the agency as illegitimate and as unfairly targeting industry players. Now, with the CFPB on life support after the Trump administration issued a stop-work order and shuttered its headquarters, the agency finds itself with an unlikely ally: the same banks that reliably complained about its rules and enforcement actions under former Director Rohit Chopra. That’s because if the Trump administration succeeds in reducing the CFPB to a shell of its former self, banks would find themselves competing directly with nonbank financial players, from big tech and fintech firms to mortgage, auto and payday lenders, that enjoy far less federal scrutiny than Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.-backed institutions. “The CFPB is the only federal agency that supervises non-depository institutions, so that would go away,” said David Silberman, a veteran banking…
