Re: OCC Guidance on Deposit-Related Consumer Credit Products (Docket ID OCC-2011-0012) Dear OCC Representative: Core Innovation Capital is submitting this letter in response to the request for comments by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) on June 8, 2011. We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the…
Short-term loans you can TRUST
A couple weeks ago, I launched my one-man campaign to eradicate APR when it comes to short-term lending and proposed we replace it with TRUST. APR is bad because actually it doesn’t help the consumer, it provokes anger which informs regulations which causes the unintended consequences of even less availability…
The Curse with Helping the Poor Save
A big part of why I love my job is because we are trying to provide the underbanked mass market with greater financial freedom. It’s great to provide lower cost payments, the ability to build credit, better credit decision tools, greater transparency and convenience. But the holy grail, really, is…
Involuntarily Unbanked
On the last day of last year, the St. Louis Fed banked published a fascinating and somewhat bizarre report, titled “A System Dynamics Approach to Understanding the Use of Banks and Alternative Financial Services in St. Louis.” Drawing on their apparently famed complex systems capabilities, the report breaks down into smaller pieces how and why…
New Type of Stimulus
If you follow these things, you’ve probably heard about the Treasury’s new (if uncompellingly named) MyAccountCard pilot. Issued by soon-to-be Green Dot’s Bonneville Bank, managed by Green Dot, the US Treasury will send these GPR cards to 600,000 underbanked households, suggesting they use the card to receive their tax refunds.…
Zestfully Clean
You’re not fully clean unless you’ve tried to get a ZestCash loan, except you won’t have any luck, unless you live in Utah. Former Googler Douglas Merrill and former Cap-Onener Shawn Budde introduced ZestCash today. It’s the latest entrant in the anti-payday online short-term lending space, following suit to Wonga,…
Treasury Seeks Access
The assistant secretary of the US Treasury, Michael Barr, gave a talk last week at the annual CFED conference and has echoed these comments in other places as well. He was talking about the underbanked. I was happy to see that most of his speech was about access. Too many…
In the Future… Transparency Rules
This is part of a series of posts inspired by CFSI’s Underbanked Financial Services Forum. At the conference, attendees were asked to complete the sentence, “in the future, the underbanked marketplace will…” on a square button. Clearly transparency in financial products is paramount, today and moving forward. And not just…
Will Obama help the underbanked?
The Obama administration certainly has the industry under fire: banks are likely to lose 70% or more of the fees they currently make from overdraft fees. Sunday, Citibank settled with New York AG Cuomo to keep a million low-end checking accounts open and free for a year at an approximate…