Bank Talk Blog

Only about one-half workers have a job that offers a retirement savings plan. Of that minority, only forty percent choose to participate. Less than seven percent “max out” on their 401 (k). For people that live to be 65, odds are that they will survive for at least another two decades. People today are going [...]

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Fannie Mae is back from the dead, having reported that its quarter-2013-over-quarter-2012 net income tripled.  When coupled with a large gain from a positive development on future tax liabilities, the company’s earnings rose to almost $60 billion. For some time, FNMA shares have been treading at 80 cents per share. Last Friday, they closed at [...]

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While initial disclosures linked a California bank to the Jackson Hewitt Smart Line of Credit, the most recent information about one of this year’s tax time loans connects it to B of I Federal Bank. Yet more review suggests that Jackson Hewitt may have published inaccurate information on its disclosure. B of I says that [...]

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Here is a humorous take on a new pitfall in the ongoing effort to address the impact of foreclosures across our country. The term “zombie foreclosure” describes a unique situation where a bank, upon foreclosing upon a homeowner, never proceeds to take ownership of a home. Normally, of course, after a bank forecloses they buy [...]

The post The Zombie Foreclosure Dance appeared first on Bank Talk.

At least two large cities have introduced their own prepaid cards recently, and each comes with prices far above almost any other card in the prepaid marketplace. Oakland’s new municipal identification card is also a Mastercard-branded prepaid card. Originally, Oakland’s card had lots of fees. They included: Two dollars to enroll the card to receive [...]

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Portfolio Recovery Associates is the nation’s largest debt collector and it could not be so without the long-time support it has received from commercial lenders at five of the country’s largest banks. Just before Christmas, Portfolio Recovery Associates reached an agreement to borrow $600 million from a group of eleven lenders. The typical debt stars [...]

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If a way to make people with prepaid cards decide to save money remains an unsolved mystery, then perhaps one solution might be to bring the reward that could come from savings into the sightlines of those individuals. The logic behind PiggyMojo, a small company whose new savings program is appended on to the Magic [...]

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Today’s Wall Street to Main Street connection centers on the financing of Dollar Financial. Dollar Financial provides payday loans, pawn lending, check cashing, unsecured short-term consumer loans, prepaid debit cards, and military installment lending. The company is now operating in several continents. Wells Fargo, in consortium, amended its existing credit agreement with DFC Global (Dollar [...]

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Even though Advance America‘s sole business is to sell payday loans, consumer installment loans, and cash advances, the company had no trouble attracting lots of money from Wall Street. The most recently available credit agreement announced by Advance America is now two years old. It is very possible that the company has renegotiated since then. [...]

The post Tracing Main Street Payday Loans back to Wall Street: Advance America appeared first on Bank Talk.

Cash America, one of the country’s largest providers of payday and pawn loans, has been able to borrow a lot of money from the Wall Street operations of some of our nation’s largest banks. Recently (March 30, 2011), Cash America secured a new credit agreement that provided $330 million in debt financing. The debt included [...]

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Fringe lenders know who to go for when they need a loan: Wells Fargo. For the last few years, no other lender has been nearly as keen as Wells when it comes to making deals with payday lenders, rent-to-own stores, tax preparers that offer refund anticipation loans, Buy-Here Pay-Here car dealers, pawn shops, or subprime [...]

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Typical costs, both on an annual basis and on a per-loan basis, to operate a retail payday loan store: wages: $77,015, $9.56 advertising: $10,836, $1.43 rent: $33,477, $4.38 loan losses: $40,830, $5.72 collections: $2,516, $.030 other (utilities, SGA, furnishings, franchise fees, interest expense, et al) : $28,639, $3.71 total costs of operating a mature store [...]

The post Pulling Back the Curtain on Retail Payday Loans appeared first on Bank Talk.

When a comment by Justin Bieber veered beyond the comfort of mainstream taste last week, it demonstrated the risks that any company takes when its aligns its brand with a celebrity. In hiring Justin Bieber, SpendSmart is leading with the sizzle but hiding the steak. Over the weekend, Bieber made a joke about Anne Frank. [...]

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The simple truth is that big banks play a vital role in making it possible for payday lending to continue to exist. The debt financing provided by Wall Street allows these firms to cash flow their business. The support for World Acceptance, through $680 million in loans and lines of credit, comes from a group [...]

The post Wall Street to Main Street: Tracing How Big Banks Fund Payday Lending appeared first on Bank Talk.

In 2011, regulators reach a settlement with some of the country’s largest servicers over improper foreclosures. It was well-deserved justice for banks that wrongfully foreclosed on borrowers – either through robo-signing but even when those borrowers were actually current on their mortgages. Here’s the thing, though: the way that money is being distributed makes no [...]

The post Three Hundred Dollars for Borrowers? Why? appeared first on Bank Talk.

It appears that down-on-their luck consumers are making good on their car loans to a degree that surprises their lenders and could possibly hint at some level of shared prosperity in the recovery of our economy. For the last year, the performance of collection of auto loans has been trending upwards. The success of Consumer [...]

The post Poor People are Paying on their Car Loans appeared first on Bank Talk.

The majority in the North Carolina General Assembly have proposed a new bill which would re-structure the regulation surrounding consumer finance lending in the state. While supporters contend that the new rule would lower interest rates, others argue that this is at best a technically correct statement that masks the meaningful impacts that it would [...]

The post SB 489: Consumer Finance Bill in North Carolina appeared first on Bank Talk.

150, 20 percent and $250,000: These are three numbers that everyone needs to know when they think about saving for retirement, according to a representative at the Employee Benefits Research Institute. 150 – the potential life span of a person born in this year. 20 percent: The share of people that will retire with more [...]

The post Bank Notes: Retirement, E*Trade, Pawn appeared first on Bank Talk.

DFC Global, the parent of Dollar Financial and an international purveyor of payday loans, released the numbers on a poor third quarter. While investors focused on if Dollar can recover, the transcript from their investor presentation provides a few telling gems about the state of the payday industry. There is a lot of disruption in [...]

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I was one of the 25 lucky folks that got a chance to meet Magic Johnson at last month’s Prepaid Expo in Orlando. Magic is very tall. Here is the photograph:                 There is no “taller” tool in Photoshop. Magic came to Orlando to speak about his new [...]

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