Big Tech payments rule is dead

The U.S. House just passed a resolution overturning the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule giving it supervisory oversight of big tech companies' payments apps. The Senate passed a similar resolution last month, and President Trump indicated at the time that he would sign off on it when the House followed suit.

The House vote was along party lines, 219 to 211. It was the third controversial CFPB rule 86'ed since President Trump took office. Last month the bureau ditched an interpretive ruling that pay-in-four buy now pay later lenders should be subject to the same rules as credit card companies. Congress also killed a rule that would have capped overdraft fees at $5 at banks and credit unions with assets exceeding $10 billion.

The Big Tech payment rule, more commonly known as the Larger Participants rule, would have applied to Big Tech firms handling at least 50 million payments a year. This would include Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, Square, and potentially X. The consumer watchdog agency, in approving the rule, estimated the most widely used covered apps collectively were processing over 13 billion consumer payments each year.

Supervisory, not regulatory

The rule gave the CFPB supervisory authority over these companies, not regulatory authority. In other words, it would be responsible for ensuring the companies complied with consumer protection laws in addition to ensuring that consumers were protected from fraud, that their sensitive personal information was adequately protected, and that they were protected from prolonged freezes and unnecessary deactivation (a/k/a debanking). The CFPB already has similar authority over regulated financial institutions.

The rule, which was hotly contested by big tech companies, took effect on Jan. 9, 2025, apparently in a rush to get it on the books before Republicans took over the White House, Senate and U.S. House.

Senator Pete Ricketts, a Nebraska Republican who sponsored the Senate resolution, described the rule as a "one-size fits all solution in search of a problem."

A pair of tech groups – Net Choice and TechNet – had sued the agency and its director Rohit Chopra in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, asserting the bureau overstepped its authority in approving the rule. Republicans in the Houe and Senate agreed. Chopra was fired by President Trump soon after taking office.

"Rolling back this regulation is critical to ensuring that the CFPB doesn't become a barrier to innovation and job creators across America," Representative Mike Flood, R-Neb., who sponsored the House version of the resolution, said in a thread posted to X following the resolution's April 9 passage.

Consumer groups not on board

Not surprisingly, consumer groups disagreed.

"The millions of people who use digital payment apps are vulnerable to fraud, unauthorized transactions, commodification of their sensitive personal information, and having their accounts deactivated or frozen, often without notice or explanation," Chuck Bell, programs director at Consumer Reports wrote in a March 2025 letter to lawmakers.

Bell added that consumer payment apps have become "ubiquitous in consumers' financial lives" and that there is "consumer demand" for the kind of action CFPB took.

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