The bank is teetering on fair lending issues. Days where "friend" discounts were arbitrarily gives have pretty much ended. Regulators are looking for consistency, and the pricing matrices should be available to all and used. If (hypothetically of course) there are different rates/fees to similarly situated applicants and a prohibited basis applicant is charged more , the regulators will not necessarily turn the other cheek.
Regulators are more often than not checking pricing disparities. Yesterday, FDIC had 3 enforcement actions to banks, all for pricing higher to Hispanics, and/or Blacks. 1 was on unsecured credit and 2 were based on auto loans. ALSO - headlines yesterday - "Chevy Chase Bank Agrees to Pay $2.85M to African-American and Hispanic Discrimination Victims".
Further in the article was the following: "The Civil Rights Division, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, and the OCC are members of the Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. President Obama established the interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force to wage an aggressive, coordinated and proactive effort to investigate and prosecute financial crimes. The task force includes representatives from a broad range of federal agencies, regulatory authorities, inspectors general and state and local law enforcement who, working together, bring to bear a powerful array of criminal and civil enforcement resources."
Don't risk the DOJ because of arbitrary pricing.
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Integrity. With it, nothing else matters. Without it, nothing else matters.