New Consumer Finance Protection Bureau Promises Agile IT

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Outdated information technology systems and processes bog down many federal agencies, contributing to what federal officials say is a productivity gap between the public and private sectors and causing many agencies to over-spend on IT maintenance. The brand-new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, luckily, has none of those problems.

The new agency, which began operation as a result of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law passed in 2010, aims to make the financial marketplace work better for consumers by promoting fairness and transparency in mortgages, credit cards, and other financial products. Tech will play a big role in that mission, CFPB CIO Chris Willey said in an interview with InformationWeek this week, his first since taking on the CIO job in September.

The CFPB serves as an interesting case study in what federal agencies might be able to do if they were able to start from scratch. Technologies and methodologies such as cloud computing, open source, agile development, and standardized data dominate the CFPB's tech strategy, which aims to keep the agency's tech lean and future-ready and the agency itself engaged directly with stakeholders such as financial institutions and the general public.

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Because its mission involves getting the financial world to work better for the public, the CFPB's website has played a major role in the bureau's initial efforts, with numerous tools to help the public understand more about loans, work with the bureau to simplify mortgages, improve the way schools communicate student loan offers, and even complain about the behavior of their financial institutions.

Design is a key part of the strategy, and Willey wants to make sure that citizens and financial institutions are able to quickly find what they're looking for on the site and easily use the tools that the CFPB offers. "We believe that user-centric design and development are core competencies," he said, adding that this applies both to the agency's website and its internally-facing technology. "A lot of agencies outsource those functions, but we feel like we need to bake it in."

One tool on the bureau's website, Know Before You Owe, helps people understand what they are getting into with mortgages, student loans, and credit cards before they sign up. For credit cards, for example, the site provides a model form that defines key terms such as "APR" and "grace period" for users, describes how these terms work, and allows users to compare the model forms with credit card forms from more than 300 card issuers. A deeper dive into student loans is due this fall.

"The whole concept is to say that, part of the problem when you buy things is that there's a lot of fine print and the documents are just too hard to understand," Willey said. "What if we had a better, simpler form or document that actually describes the instrument?"

The CFPB's site also allows users to file credit card complaints, describing what happened and how they want to see their situation resolved. After users enter their information and information on their credit card company into the site, banks then use a separate portal where they can see all the complaints and show how they have resolved the complaints. Throughout that process, consumers can track their complaint and the bank's response or lack thereof.

Also on the docket for the bureau are a website redesign and a push toward open data. A redesign of the website's look and feel is due by late February or early March, Willey said. Open-source search eventually will be part of the package.

Willey said he expects the bureau to provide open data online soon, including, for example, data about where around the country the most troubled mortgages and student loans are. In all, Willey said the agency already has tens of terabytes of data, and expects that number to rise into the hundreds of terabytes in the near future, though much of that won't be public.

Standardized data will be a big piece of this puzzle, but Willey said that in some circumstances, the CFPB might even have to develop data standards of its own or use emerging standards, as some of the data types the CFPB will be working with don't yet exist elsewhere or aren't widely adopted. For example, the CFPB is adopting the use of Legal Entity Identifiers, a standard being developed that will identify all corporate entities by reference to a unique ID.

Behind the scenes at the CFPB, open source, cloud computing, agile development, and the imperative of good design are the keys to IT operations, said Willey. For instance, instead of continuing to rely on what the bureau considered to be a bulky Treasury Department process for enrollment in employee transportation subsidies, the CFPB developed a new transportation reimbursement application that automatically routes employee requests to the appropriate manager and does away with paper processes. The redesign took one developer all of two weeks.

"We think that there are hundreds of those types of opportunities within any agency, ours included, and because we are just now standing up some of those processes, now is the time," he said. "Otherwise, you just end up like every other agency or large organization, having legacy processes that aren't automated."

The transportation app also dovetails with the CFPB's open-source strategy. The bureau plans to release the code so that other agencies, many of which have transportation reimbursement policies, can use the same app.

"We sort of have an open source ethos here," Willey said. "In general, we believe that open source provides opportunities, not only initially to save money, but also to make things more easily integrated down the road." The CFPB plans to release a source code policy that will talk about the bureau's use of open source and how it plans to open source software that it develops.

Cloud computing plays a huge part in CFPB's IT world, said Willey. As he characterizes it, the agency is "almost all in the public cloud," with many of its IT services running in Terremark's Enterprise Cloud and Amazon Web Services. Among the apps running in the cloud is SAS analytics software, which is running at Terremark.

Willey admits that this isn't something that any agency could do. The oldest system the bureau uses, a case management system for bank examiners, is from 2004, and so the CFPB doesn't have any of the mainframe headaches that other agencies have that make it hard to move services to the cloud or in some circumstances even develop web-based front ends.

Willey said that the bureau plans to rely heavily on high-volume data links to mitigate any problems with latency caused by having so much of its infrastructure running in the cloud. "That's going to continue to be a challenge, but we can't ever let the network be a bottleneck for the things we want to do," he said.

Though it uses the Department of the Treasury's infrastructure for email, the phone system, and a few other apps, the bureau is thinking about moving some of those services, particularly email, to the cloud as well. The CFPB is using the Treasury's Microsoft Exchange environment for email now, but will soon put out a procurement for cloud-based email, Willey said.

As an example of how traditional IT could hold the agency back, and how the cloud could provide increased flexibility and scalability, Willey recounts that several weeks ago the CFPB had to migrate a group of users from one storage group within Exchange to another because it was running out of disk space. "It's 2012, we need to be doing this in a different way," he said. "That's the goal, not to worry about those things ever again, and to have our services in the cloud."

Instead of the big monolithic app development process still rampant elsewhere in government, the CFPB focuses on agile development. There's typically a two-week sprint cycle for most projects at the bureau, according to Willey, which means that the bureau is able to get functionality out to users early and incrementally.

Just outside the office is a Post-It-plastered wall keeping track of the various agile development projects underway at the bureau. It's a system that Willey said one day soon will be digitized. He envisions Web-based access to a digital version of the Post-Its and touchscreens set up where the notes are posted today, all powered by agile project management software such as Atlassian's GreenHopper project tracking product.

The majority of the CFPB's small tech team, meanwhile--currently about 30 federal employees and 15 contractors--works in an open floor plan devoid of cubicles and offices in order to encourage collaboration. As the new bureau grows, Willey will need to work to ensure that the culture of openness continues in the CPFB's relationship with the public, too.

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