Tag Archives: Payday Lending

CFPB

News Release: 160+ Groups Urge Clear Fee Disclosures for Paycheck Advance Apps in Letter to the CFPB

More than 160 consumer, labor, civil rights, faith-based, and community organizations submitted a comment letter to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in support of its proposed interpretive rule ensuring important legal protections for consumers who use earned wage advance (EWA) or other fintech cash advance products that need to be repaid with the borrower’s next paycheck. The letter calls for clearer cost and fee disclosures for these workplace payday loans. 

News Release: Much Needed Workplace Payday Loan Rule Will Help Curb Predatory Loan Practices

Today’s interpretative rule by the Consumer Financial Product Bureau on workplace payday loans (or the so-called Earned Wage Access products) will clearly label these products as loans, subjecting them to the laws, disclosures, and protections that consumers deserve if they choose products that are effectively high-cost loans. As a result of this proposal, companies offering these loans will have to follow basic rules such as the 55-year-old Truth in Lending Act to disclose the annual percentage rate of these loans.

In The News: Big Tech Wants Your Paycheck (The Lever)

Although the ALEC bill offers some form of consumer protection from civil suits and collection agencies, it is really “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Christine Chen Zinner, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform, a nonprofit focused on consumer protection and an ethical financial system. “I like to think of these as workplace payday loans, because that’s really what they are, they are a loan,” Chen Zinner told The Lever. “There’s an expectation to be repaid, there’s a consequence if they aren’t repaid, so it’s really a loan.”

News Release: New OCC Rule Protecting Predatory Lenders Could Face Legal Challenge

The regulator of the nation’s largest banks has finalized a rule that allows predatory lenders to do an end-run around state interest rate caps, exposing people to loans in excess of 100% APR that violate state rate limits. Merely by putting a bank’s name on the fine print of the paperwork, predatory lenders could claim that the loan is a bank loan exempt from state rate caps.

sign for the CFPB outside a building

NEWS RELEASE: Rollback of Payday Protections Enables Predator Profiteering Amid Health Crisis

The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kathleen Kraninger, today announced the agency will strip out the core of a rule written and finalized under previous leadership that would shield consumers from debt trap payday and car-title loans. The decision will leave millions of people vulnerable to grave financial abuses at a time of economic crisis, and will harm people of color who are suffering higher rates of illness and of unemployment, and whom this industry targeted even before the pandemic.  

Polling Memo: Strong Support for Capping Interest Rates Amid Pandemic

Americans of all partisan identities, and across all regions of the United States, strongly support enacting new consumer protections on high-interest lending during the coronavirus crisis. Americans are highly supportive of prohibiting all high-interest loans during the crisis and of capping interest rates for consumer loans, according to a new bipartisan poll from Lake Research Partners and Chesapeake Beach Consulting.

In The News: How to Buy a Regulation in Six Short Months (The American Prospect)

Under the rule, a borrower would have to sign a notice authorizing the lender to withdraw from the account after those two consecutive failures. “If I was smart, I would only sign that if there was money in there,” says Linda Jun, a policy counsel with Americans for Financial Reform, a regulatory and consumer protection coalition. “Aside from getting charged more for a negative balance, banks close bank accounts over this stuff, you could lose access to banking entirely.”