Updated: March 2013

Ruth Susswein

Deputy Director, National Priorities

Ruth Susswein is Consumer Action’s Deputy Director of National Priorities. Since 2006, she has focused her energies on consumer advocacy, financial literacy, and financial empowerment.

Susswein has worked on passage of financial regulatory reform legislation (Dodd-Frank), concentrating on the need to create a national, independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). She chairs a committee on CFPB consumer complaint handling for the umbrella consumer group Americans for Financial Reform.

Susswein also advocates for vast improvements in mortgage industry practices and the Administration’s efforts to help homeowners at risk of foreclosure.

Susswein worked to help pass the first credit card legislation in decades, the Credit CARD Act. She helps educate community-based organizations on changes in credit card law, foreclosure prevention programs, consumer protection and other personal finance issues, as part of Consumer Action’s free financial empowerment training sessions. Among other things, she leads Consumer Action's editorial team in the planning, writing and editing of most issues of the Consumer Action’s quarterly newsletter, Consumer Action News.

Susswein joined Consumer Action with long experience in consumer advocacy. Previously, she was the executive director of the national non-profit credit education consumer group Bankcard Holders of America (BHA).

Prior to joining BHA, she was the Investigative Consumer reporter for the ABC affiliate in Springfield, MA. where she exposed credit repair scams, second mortgage schemes and unscrupulous practices by landlords and home improvement contractors. She has also worked at WABC-TV in New York in the Investigative and Consumer units.