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A major auto lender has decided to change its approval process to look beyond credit scores in an effort to pump up sales, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The move by Ford Motor Co.’s financing unit is expected to unfold in coming years, even as concerns mount about rising auto-loan losses in the industry. Ford Motor Credit is expected to announce the plans as soon as today. The company says that it is looking at ways to increase loan and lease approvals for applicants with limited credit histories. These consumers are often denied credit because they lack a history of managing debt and as a result have low credit scores. Ford’s credit division plans to review new data to try to determine whether these customers, as well as those with more robust borrowing histories, are likely to repay their loans.

A student loan company is creating barriers for teachers, social workers and others to get the loan forgiveness they’re entitled to, according to the Attorney General of Massachusetts, MarketWatch.com reported yesterday. Attorney General Maura Healey yesterday sued the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency (PHEAA), accusing the company of mishandling borrowers’ accounts and prolonging the amount of time they’d have to wait to have their debt wiped away under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF). The initiative allows borrowers who work for the government and certain types of nonprofits to have their federal student loans forgiven after 120 months or 10 years of payments. But according to Healey’s suit, PHEAA, which has the exclusive government contract to work with borrowers in the forgiveness program, delayed processing borrowers’ paperwork, which will ultimately force them to pay their debts for longer than necessary before receiving forgiveness.

Companies have the choice of taking legal action when they feel they have been wronged, but consumers are frequently blocked from exercising the same legal right when they believe that companies have wronged them, according to an op-ed by Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Richard Cordray in today’s New York Times. That’s because many contracts for products like credit cards and bank accounts have mandatory arbitration clauses that prevent consumers from joining group lawsuits, forcing them to go it alone, according to Cordray. For example, a group lawsuit against Wells Fargo for secretly opening phony bank accounts was blocked by arbitration clauses that pushed individual consumers into closed-door proceedings. In 2010, Cordray said that the CFPB was authorized to study mandatory arbitration and write rules consistent with the study. After five years of work, we recently finalized a rule to stop companies from denying groups of consumers the option of going to court when they are treated unfairly. The rule does not ban individual arbitration, as our opponents falsely claim, according to Cordray. It simply ensures that consumers have the option of joining together to sue companies. Companies and consumers can still use arbitration to resolve their differences, but companies cannot unilaterally block group lawsuits, Cordray writes.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) yesterday filed a complaint and proposed settlement against Aequitas Capital Management, Inc. and related entities, for aiding the Corinthian Colleges’ predatory lending scheme, according to a CFPB press release. The CFPB alleges that Aequitas enabled Corinthian to make high-cost private loans to Corinthian students so that it would seem as if the school was making enough outside revenue to meet the requirements for receiving federal student aid dollars. The risky loans saddled students with high-priced debt that both Aequitas and Corinthian knew students could not afford. Under the CFPB’s proposed settlement, if approved, about 41,000 Corinthian students could be eligible for approximately $183.3 million in loan forgiveness and reduction. In collaboration with the CFPB, several state attorneys general have also reached proposed settlements with Aequitas.