Elizabeth Warren, the Obama administration's new consumer financial protection czar, said on Thursday that banks are showing early receptiveness to her plans for simplifying their disclosures to consumers.
Warren, who was last week appointed to a special advisory role to set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told CNN that she believes financial services firms want to do a better job for customers on products like mortgage and credit card agreements.
"I have to say, meetings with folks from the industry have been really good. I think the reason for that is that more of them say this is that this has been unsustainable, this isn't going to work over time," Warren said.
Warren told CNBC that the intent of the new CFPB is not to make life tougher for banks but rather better for their customers.
Warren also said she didn't understand the political opposition to her appointment and was determined to push ahead.
"The truth is I don't care about the title. I want to get to work trying to get this agency going because that's what middle class families need. We've got a broken market," she said. "It's a political assessment that I just have to say I don't know and I don't think much about it. The part I care about is getting the agency started."
Rather than risk what promised to be a bruising confirmation fight with opposition on both sides of the aisle, Obama named Warren, a Harvard law school professor, as head of an agency that will look to help consumers victimized by unscrupulous credit practices.
As part of that goal, Warren said she's determined to simplify the process consumers go through to apply for credit. That doesn't necessarily have to mean hurting the finance industry, she said.
"What I object to is building a profit model around fooling people," she said. "That is dangerous for families, it's dangerous for our whole economy."
The process also will entail shrinking government bureaucracy. Seven agencies oversee part of a process that now will be brought under one roof for the new bureau and its $440 million budget.
"I hope to work with the industry, to work with consumers to try and find something that works better not just for banks and not just for families but for the whole economy," Warren said. "We brought ourselves to the brink of disaster one bad mortgage at a time, one destroyed family at a time. We've got to fix that."
She told CNN that full U.S. Senate confirmation as head of the CFPB could have taken up to a year, during which she would not be able to do her job or talk publicly about the changes she wanted to make.
Previously, Warren, a Harvard Law School professor and consumer advocate, had chaired the Congressional Oversight Panel, which helped police the Treasury's $700 billion bailout program.
