Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Can Banks Disrupt the Payday Lending Business?
Can Banks Disrupt the Payday Lending Business?
Nov 14, 2025 9:57 AM

Since its inception in the 1990s, the payday lending industry has grown at an astonishing pace. Currently, there are about 22,000 payday lending locations — more than two for every Starbucks — that originate an estimated $27 billion in annual loan volume.

But payday lenders may soon face some petition. A few of the largest consumer banks in America are considering goingto market with new small-dollar installment loan products, reports the American Banker.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the U.S. government’s consumer protection agency, isconsidering proposing rulesthat would end payday debt traps by requiring lenders to take steps to make sure consumers can repay their loans. One of the proposals is to exempt lenders from certain requirements if the amount the consumer is required to pay each month is no more than 5 percent of the consumer’s gross monthly e. According to American Banker:

[T]he banks said if the 5% exemption is part of the proposal, they believe they can offer a product that would satisfy regulators. A mockup of what the product could look like would be a $500 five-month loan for a borrower with an annual e of $30,000 and monthly payments of $125 (or 5% of the borrower’s $2,500 average monthly e). After assuming a 6% loss rate (which would parable to similar installment loans currently on the market), automation expenses and servicing fees, a bank could net roughly $70 while the borrower would be on the hook for $125. The average cost of a similar payday loan product would be closer to $750.

“The 5% payment option is the only part of the CFPB proposal that could save millions of borrowers billions of dollars,” said Nick Bourke, director of the small-dollar loans project at the Pew Charitable Trusts. “It would enhance underwriting while pliance costs by capping the monthly payment at 5% of the borrower’s e with a term up to six months.”

The banks wouldn’t make much money off of these types of loans, but as the article notes, they would increase goodwill with munities and potentially entice under-banked consumers to use other banking services and products.

The CFPB is set to announce the beginning of the payday lending rulemaking process next Thursday, June 2nd at a field hearing in Kansas City.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
ICCR Shareholders Target PepsiCo
When New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued his diktat against 20-ounce soft drinks earlier this year, the negative public outcry was tremendous. es the Interfaith Council on Corporate Responsibility with proxy shareholder resolutions aimed at PepsiCo, the pany of Pepsi Cola, Tropicana, Quaker Oats, Frito Lay and Gatorade. At issue is PepsiCo’s freely acknowledged use of genetically modified organisms in several of its products. Apparently the ICCR takes umbrage with GMOs and, by extension, PepsiCo’s use thereof. The ICCR...
Dallas Willard: Business is a ‘moving force of the love of God’
In a new video from Biola University, Dallas Willard explains how “business is a primary arrangement, on God’s part, for people to love one another and serve one another.” (HT) Willard goes on to explain how God does not wait for Christians to use business as a means for serving the needs of the world: If God wasn’t in business it wouldn’t even be there. It has this natural tendency to reach out to the neighbor and the neighbor and...
Finally, A Monument to Calvin Coolidge
Today, career politicians are out of fashion. In light of Washington’s dysfunction and a hyper partisan culture, the words of politicians offer little reassurances. Their deeds even less. One career public servant is finding his popularity on an upswing exactly eighty years after his death. I asked my grandfather, who turns 97 in July, to rank America’s great presidents? He immediately answered Ronald Reagan, almost reflexively. And then paused for a few moments and declared, “That Calvin Coolidge fellow was...
Audio: On NPR, Samuel Gregg Discusses Pope Francis and Economics
National Public Radio did a roundup of views on what to expect from Pope Francis on economic issues. Reporter Jim Zarroli interviewed Acton Research Director Samuel Gregg and mentators on the Catholic left. NPR host Audie Cornish introduced Zarroli’s report by observing that the new pope es from Argentina, where poverty and debt have long posed serious challenges. In the past, when thrust into debates about the country’s economic future, Francis had made ments about wealth, inequality and the markets....
Acton Publications On Logos Bible Software
Now available for pre-order on Logos Bible Software: all 15 volumes (30 issues) of the Journal of Markets & Morality and all 14 volumes of Acton’s Christian Social Thought series. More titles, including many from Christian’s Library Press, are ing as well. Logos Bible Software allows students, pastors, and scholars to study the Bible through a vast library of fully indexed resources, including original languages, mentaries, encyclopedias, scholarly articles, lexicons, and more. Now among those resources, the Journal of Markets...
Work Is More Than a Means to Evangelism
As already discussed, Matthew Lee Anderson’s recent Christianity Today cover story on “radical Christianity” has been making waves. This week at The High Calling, Marcus Goodyear offers a healthy critique of one of Anderson’s key subjects, David Platt, aligning quite closely with Anderson’s analysis about the ultimatechallenges such movements face when es to long-term cultural cultivation. Focusing on Platt’s latest book, Follow Me, Goodyear notes that, despite Platt’s admirable efforts to get Christians “off their seats,” he often “emphasizes the...
Samuel Gregg on TheBlaze TV: Europe is Getting Ugly Again
Acton’s Director of Research and author of ing Europe, Sam Gregg, will be on TheBlaze TV tonight at 6 p.m. EST. The discussion will focus on the current economic situation in Cyprus, where some officials are saying bank depositors could lose up to 40% of their savings. Gregg’s book focuses on Europe’s entitlement culture, heavy taxation, government-regulated markets and over-bearing bureaucracy. He asks the question, “Is this America’s future?” Is the current situation in Cyprus simply a sign of the...
Faith-Based Proxy Resolutions and GMOs
The Dow Chemical Co., along with E.I. Du Pont de Nemours, e under fire from the Adrian Dominicans and the Sisters of Charity due to panies’ production of genetically modified organisms. No, the sisters aren’t mounting the barricades outside the two corporations to protest what they might term “Frankenfoods,” but they have submitted proxy shareholder resolutions to demand, among other things, panies review and report by November 2013 on: Adequacy of plans for removing GE [genetically engineered] seed from the...
Women of Liberty: Gertrude Himmelfarb
(March is Women’s History Month. Acton will be highlighting a number of women who have contributed significantly to the issue of liberty during this month.) What does the Victorian era have to do with contemporary culture and society? Quite a bit, in the mind and work of Gertrude Himmelfarb, an American historian who called her own work “the history of ideas.” Himmelfarb has been criticized for her call to the return of traditional values (like shame, personal responsibility and self-reliance)...
Texas-Size Educational Choice
Over 100,000 students in Texas are on the charter school wait list—and with the number of charter schools capped at 215, they have a long wait ahead of them. But state senator Dan Patrick—a self-described “education evangelist”—is attempting to implement a radical educational reform. Patrick is sponsoring two consequential school choice proposals. One would remove the limit on the number of licenses Texas issues to operate charter schools and created a special board to oversee the new charter applications he...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved