The U.S. Senate has joined the House of Representatives in approving a bill (H.R. 4367) amending the Electronic Fund Transfer Act to eliminate the requirement that a fee disclosure be placed in a prominent and conspicuous location on or at an automated teller machine. Once the bill is signed into law by the President, the fee disclosure will only need to be made on the ATM screen.  We have previously observed that the requirement served no purpose other than to spawn a cottage industry of strike suits against ATM owners and operators around the country.  

 The CFPB had identified the sticker requirement as a candidate for elimination in its request last year for public comment on opportunities to streamline the regulations it inherited from the Fed.  We assume the CFPB will now propose an amendment to remove the requirement from
Regulation E. 

We will be interested to see whether the elimination of the sticker requirement will impact the Department of Justice’s amicus participation in support of the plaintiff in Charvat v. First National Bank of Wahoo, a case pending before the Eighth Circuit that raises the question whether a plaintiff has Article III standing to sue for an alleged statutory violation that caused no actual injury.  Charvat raises the standing question in the context of an alleged violation of the ATM sticker requirement.