RICHARD Cordray, a regulator whom Republicans love to hate, knows about being grilled in public: the cameras, the confident questioners, and the audience anticipating a mistake. His first time in the limelight was on the game show Jeopardy! But that was nothing compared with the mauling he has received at the hands of his conservative overseers in Congress, who have called him a ‘dictator’.

Mr Cordray, 57, heads the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was set up after the last financial crisis to stop customers being ripped off. But his experience of the spotlight began in 1987, when he had a streak of wins on the quiz show Jeopardy!.

“Not too shabby,” an impressed President Barack Obama said in 2011 when he nominated Mr Cordray to run the bureau.

Financial regulator defends his role as consumer champion in face of Congress hostility

The president was thrusting Mr Cordray back into the public eye as the whiff of rotten mortgages from the crisis still lingered, inviting him to lead a regulator created as part of the Dodd-Frank reforms. It was the brainchild of the anti-Wall Street senator Elizabeth Warren and it has left US financial institutions feeling browbeaten.

Mr Cordray, a softly spoken lawyer with a steely core, plays down the Jeopardy! plaudits. “People are unreasonably impressed by that,” he tells the Financial Times. “It doesn’t mean you’re smart, doesn’t mean you have good judgment. It just means you have a lot of facts rattling round in the back of your head.”

The facts he plucks out today concern what the CFPB has done to stamp out malfeasance in areas ranging from mortgages, student loans and payday lending to credit scoring and debt collection. In its five-year life, the agency’s enforcement actions have yielded more than $12bn in restitution from financial institutions for over 27m wronged consumers, Mr Cordray says.

“That, coupled with our supervision work, has created a change in mindset around consumer complaints . . . and made [financial institutions] recognise that there’s a new day,” he says. “They can do just fine while treating their customers right, and they no longer need to try to find ways to treat their customers badly to get a little extra squeeze.”

In its biggest cases since 2014, the CFPB ordered Bank of America and Citibank each to provide more than $700m in relief to consumers hit by illegal credit card practices. Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, regularly lauds its efforts.

Before the crisis, responsibility for consumer protection was atomised between multiple regulators. The Federal Reserve had the power to rein in sometimes fraudulent mortgage lending, but did not use it.

Mr Cordray, a former Ohio attorney-general and Supreme Court clerk with a degree from Oxford University, was appointed to prevent more bad behaviour. Republicans spent two years blocking Mr Cordray’s confirmation, but relented in 2013. They have not been happy since.

At Donald Trump’s Republican convention, the party approved a policy statement calling for the CFPB to be abolished. It says the ‘regulatory harassment’ is making it harder for Americans to get home loans - a charge Mr Cordray disputes.

Cam Fine, head of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade group, gives Mr Cordray credit for listening to banks’ grievances. But he says that in many cases the bureau adopts a ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ attitude. “The staff acts as if consumers are these innocent lambs walking into the slaughterhouse,” he says.

Mr Cordray does not demur when asked if he is engineering a shift in responsibility from buyer beware to seller beware. “Banks . . . need to think about treating their customers fairly and that needs to be a much higher priority than it was,” he says.

Despite speculation that he will run for governor of Ohio in 2018, Mr Cordray has said he is solely focused on the CFPB. He is likely to face one more grilling on Capitol Hill before this year’s elections, but unlike on Jeopardy! he will not have all the right answers for Republicans.

Asked why his bureau faces such hostility, he says: “I don’t really know. I think we are showing that the government can actually work for people and make a difference in their ordinary lives . . . Would we have been much better off if something similar had been in place 15 years ago before we got into the mess that led to the financial crisis? I think resoundingly yes.”

Published in Dawn, Business & Finance weekly, August 22nd, 2016