Why Banks Shun 30 Million Americans
By Tim Chen
A quarter of US households have few or no ties to the banking system, which hurts their financial future.
Financial reform has made it even harder for banks to serve them.
They are 30 million consumers, representing a quarter of US households, who earn a collective $1.3 trillion a year. But banks don’t want to serve them, because they lose money. And the nonfinancial institutions who do serve them may not be offering them much value in the long term.
Welcome to the world of the unbanked and underbanked, who in a weird twist may have fewer banking options after Congress passed legislation aimed at protecting them from high bank fees. So who will serve these consumers, who either use no mainstream financial services or have a checking or savings account but also utilize nonbank financial services such as check cashers, payday lenders, and pawnbrokers? A huge opportunity awaits someone.
In the good old days, banks would have stepped in. They received substantial revenue from interchange and overdraft fees, which essentially subsidized checking and savings accounts. But financial reform passed by Congress in 2010 brought the so-called Durbin amendment, which slashed banks’ profits on debit card transactions, and Regulation E, which severely limited the overdraft fees that banks could charge.
In response, many banks have instigated high fees that effectively discourage low-income customers from opening (or keeping) accounts. It’s not by accident. To get a sense of why banks aren’t terribly interested in serving low-income customers, take a look at the following example. Imagine it’s 2007, pre-crisis and pre-regulation.
Continued At The Christian Science Monitor
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