CRL in the News

“These are big improvements for getting rid of these fees and at the same time allowing and providing affordable credit,” says David Silberman, a senior fellow for the Center for Responsible Lending.

"TAB Bank is misusing its bank charter by fronting for abusive loans that bleed consumers dry," Nadine Chabrier, policy and litigation counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, said Tuesday in a statement. "Responsible merchants should stop peddling predatory EasyPay loans, and the FDIC should end TAB Bank's participation in this scheme." The FDIC declined to comment. EasyPay and TAB...

“TAB Bank is misusing its bank charter by fronting for abusive loans that bleed consumers dry,” said Nadine Chabrier, policy and litigation counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending. “Responsible merchants should stop peddling predatory EasyPay loans and the FDIC should end TAB Bank’s participation in this scheme.”

But Ellen Harnick, an executive vice president with the Center for Responsible Lending, said more must be done to ensure there are guardrails in place that allow states to protect their residents from potentially predatory rent-a-bank arrangements. “It's very clear, and courts have been clear, that what's needed is to look behind appearances, behind the facial presentation of an arrangement...

“The economic impacts of this crisis highlight how communities of color are disproportionately harmed by structural inequities that exacerbate the impact of lower incomes, stagnant wages, lack of savings, lower credit scores, higher unemployment rates and a multitude of other issues,” said Ellen Harnick, executive vice president at the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group.

“While income-driven repayment plans have allowed many student borrowers to make affordable payments, only a handful of borrowers have had their loans canceled through IDR,” Julia Barnard, Center for Responsible Lending’s student loan team co-lead and researcher recently said in a statement. “Decades of bad servicing, complicated paperwork and policy failures have broken borrowers’ faith in this program.

Lawmakers in states that ban payday lending and have other strong consumer protections are likely to take notice of the CFPB’s potential new stance when considering how to treat pay advance products, said Yasmin Farahi, a senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. “In some ways, those existing state consumer laws, which we think are how they should...

Buy now/pay later products claim to offer consumers a risk-free way to boost their buying power, and maybe build credit and help others in the process. But beneath the shiny new veneer of technology and altruism could lurk the same predatory and abusive practices used by venture capitalists whose primary interest is profit, and who in the past have used...

“This is a very strong program that creates both limits, guardrails and the supports that people need to get through cash crunches that are going to continue to come to many working families,” Mike Calhoun, the president of the Center for Responsible Lending, an advocacy group that promotes financial fairness, said in an interview.

Big U.S. banks have generated about $9 billion annually in revenue from overdraft, ATM and other fees in recent years, according to the Center for Responsible Lending, or CRL. The fees have become somewhat of a cash cow for banks over the past 20 years, some experts have said. Taylor Roberson, a fintech regulation expert at CRL, said Bankrate's survey...