CRL in the News

Nadine Chabrier, senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, said: 'The monthly subscription fee attached to the Klarna Plus product is clearly a finance charge under the Truth in Lending Act, so we expect Klarna and other lenders offering similar products will provide consumers with the disclosures and consumer protections required by that law.

Overdraft fees accounted for $10 billion in revenue in 2004, but skyrocketed to an estimated $25 billion by 2009, according to research by the Center for Responsible Lending. By 2019, under pressure from the CFPB, overdraft fee revenue had dropped to an estimated $12.6 billion.

“There are families struggling, paycheck to paycheck, [that] are getting hammered, and it is a real tax on access to their deposit funds,” said Michael Calhoun, the president of the Center for Responsible Lending, which has advocated for such rules.

"This issue has had a lot of strong support from civil rights and small-business advocates and there's been a fair amount of advocacy around this," said David Ferreira, senior government relations manager at the Center for Responsible Lending. He cited widespread support for the rule among nearly 100 civil rights and consumer groups, including the Consumer Federation of America, Center...

"People are paying quite a lot to use these apps," said Andrew Kushner, senior policy counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer protection advocacy group that supports California's current move to regulate this growing industry. "It doesn't necessarily look like a lot at first glance." Currently, this industry operates in a grey area legally, with little federal oversight.

In the United States, charging an APR of 455 percent on a consumer credit card is virtually unheard of — and in some cases, would be illegal, said David Silberman, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending. Twenty states plus D.C. set limits on the interest rates that payday lenders may charge; the highest of these is...

States are starting to grapple with purportedly new categories of small-dollar loans: earned wage advances and other types of fintech cash advances. Their approach will determine if workers and consumers will be protected from spiraling fees that drain low wages or if a new kind of payday loan will be allowed to operate outside of laws against high-cost lending.

Stigma around credit cards has driven people away from them, even though they are better regulated and come with fraud protections and other perks, said Peter Smith, senior researcher at the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer-advocacy group.

But the use of BNPL comes with risks for consumers, similar to any other financial tool. TheStreet spoke to Center for Responsible Learning (CRL) senior litigation and policy counsel Nadine Chabrier and WalletHub analyst Cassandra Happe to understand what entices consumers to use BNPL and the important information consumers need to know about the growing product.

Nadine Chabrier, senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, worries about consumers who take out multiple BNPL loans. “It’s easy to lose track, and you can quickly be in a situation where you have payments due all over the month,” Chabrier told Checkbook. “You don’t get a statement, and you may end up getting overdraft fees if you...