Sen. Elizabeth Warren spent months demanding regulators kill Enova International’s bank deal. On Sept. 14 she got her wish. Enova announced a buyback.
As funerals go, it was upbeat.
Enova withdrew its applications with the Comptroller of the Currency and the Fed, killing a $369 million deal for Grasshopper Bancorp. The same day it reaffirmed guidance, projected roughly 25% third-quarter revenue growth and said it would accelerate repurchases. Its CEO added, with what reads like a shrug, that growth never required a bank.
Shareholders took a beating. Borrowers did not. Same loans, same prices, now buybacks into a stock that fell nearly 20% on the news. What died was the Enova that would have sat inside the banking system, supervised by the Fed and held to capital requirements and the Community Reinvestment Act.
Warren stopped no loans. She moved them to a room with no windows. Follow it. She says nonbank lenders prey on the vulnerable, then campaigns to keep one out of the supervised banking system. The objection is not to supervision. It is to the lending.
In May she and Sen. Chris Van Hollen sent a letter to Comptroller Jonathan Gould and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh demanding denial, and 20 state attorneys general mailed their own. It worked. Enova’s CEO then said the quiet part out loud: the process becomes “susceptible to political pressure and outside advocacy” instead of the statutory factors that should govern it.
He didn’t name her. He didn’t have to. When the ranking member of Senate Banking demands denial, 20 attorneys general follow, and the applicant concludes the process runs on advocacy rather than statute, you don’t need a confession. You need a calendar.
Those factors are not secret. Congress wrote them down at 12 U.S.C. § 1842(c). Capital. Managerial resources. Compliance history. Safety and soundness. Competition. Community convenience and needs. Financial stability. A regulator weighs them and decides. Notice what is missing: the preferences of a senator.
Washington already settled this, in Warren’s disfavor. Since 2025, three federal agencies have removed “reputation risk” from bank supervision on the express ground that it had been used to pressure banks away from lawful customers. The OCC dropped it first, the Fed followed, the OCC and FDIC codified the removal by rule in April, and in June all three reissued 15 guidance documents without it. The principle runs both directions. If it is improper to push a lawful business out of banking on political grounds, it is improper to keep a qualified applicant out on the same grounds.
Somewhere in Warren’s office is a chart ranking debt by moral quality. A mortgage is dignified. A car note is responsible. A student loan is a tragedy requiring forgiveness. But $500 borrowed by a warehouse worker whose transmission died Tuesday? Predatory. The lender gets marched out.
Enova says it has lent $72 billion to 15 million customers, people mainstream banking abandoned. The Philadelphia Fed counts 12.3 million Americans in banking deserts after 5,413 branch closures.
We know what follows, because the Fed measured it. New York Fed economists studied states that capped rates at 36%. For the riskiest tenth of borrowers, balances fell about 15% and accounts about 20%. Delinquency did not improve. Nobody moved to a mainstream lender. Credit rose instead for safer borrowers the cap never touched, leading the Fed’s researchers to conclude the caps may shift credit from lower-income households to higher-income ones.
Read that twice. Rate caps take credit from poor people and hand it to people already fine. In New Mexico, licensed small-loan companies fell from 531 to 266 after the cap. No transmission got cheaper.
There is also a mail merge involved. In August she sent a nearly identical letter urging regulators to block OppFi’s purchase of BNC National Bank. Same argument, same senator, same template.
To be clear: I have no idea whether this deal should have been approved. That belonged to regulators, on the record, against a statute. Maybe they would have said no. My objection is that a senator leaned on the scale until the applicant quit.
Sen. Warren should be ashamed of herself. That is not consumer protection. Bank acquisitions should be scored on metrics, not political popularity. If she thinks Enova is unfit, she can file a comment and lose if the numbers go against her. She skipped the argument and took the verdict.
She wanted to dance on Enova’s grave. Unfortunately the corpse was at the gym, buying its own stock at the discount she created.
So somebody tell the warehouse worker what was won on her behalf. The lender is open. The rate is unchanged. The examiner who would have walked through that door was sent home.