WASHINGTON — With its first chief now in place, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will start enforcing rules aimed at reining in abusive mortgage servicers, student lenders and payday-loan companies.

It will be months, though, before the agency can police other areas of consumer finance, such as debt collection and credit-reporting bureaus.

Over Republican opposition, President Barack Obama used a congressional recess appointment Wednesday to install Richard Cordray to lead the consumer finance watchdog. The bureau was created in July as part of the 2010 overhaul of the nation’s financial regulations.

The idea behind the new agency was to prevent financial companies, such as mortgage servicers, from exploiting consumers. Such companies, facing scant federal oversight, committed some of the worst consumer abuses before the financial crisis.

In the past, only banks were subject to examination by federal financial regulators. And until now, with no permanent director, the bureau had authority to supervise only big banks.

Senate Republicans had vowed to block Cordray’s nomination until the agency’s structure was changed to allow closer congressional oversight. But Obama took advantage of the congressional break to install Cordray, a former Democratic attorney general of Ohio.

Cordray said he would immediately “begin working to expand our program to non-banks, which is an area we haven’t been able to touch up until now.”

That change will likely start within weeks. Agency officials who are supervising big banks have already been trained to examine non-bank financial firms.