CRL in the News

Overdraft fees are big money-makers for banks. Before the pandemic, JPMorgan Chase earned about $1.5 billion annually in overdraft fees, Bank of America made $1.1 billion, Wells Fargo collected $1.3 billion and Capital One charged about $150 million, according to a report by the Center for Responsible Lending.

“Bank overdraft fees cause particular harm to low-income consumers and communities of color, who are already disproportionately excluded from the banking mainstream,” said a 2020 report from the Center for Responsible Lending. While the typical overdraft fee is $35, the report said, “the cost to the bank of processing an overdraft transaction, particularly in today’s highly automated environment, is very...

“Not only do they have less wealth to borrow on to pay back loans because of the racial wealth gap, but the underfunding of HBCUs compound the financial challenges which result in higher debt for students who attend these schools,” said Rep. Alma Adams, who appeared on a panel hosted by the Center for Responsible Lending(CRL) on Thursday.

It’s hard to pinpoint when banks began charging overdraft fees in the US. Vox reached out to JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America to ask when they started charging account maintenance and overdraft fees, but none of them shared when they implemented these charges. According to a 2020 report from the Center for Responsible Lending, banks historically declined...

Listen to a discussion of the state of the national student loan debt crisis and some relief that the Biden administration has made available.

Now, a group of consumer advocates is asking the Biden-era CFPB to reverse that decision. Earlier this month, a coalition led by the National Consumer Law Center and the Center for Responsible Lending, wrote to the agency urging officials to regulate earned wage access products as credit.

“All of those risks are the very same risks we talk about when we talk about payday lending,” Borné said. When a borrower uses a payday loan, they also give the lender access to their checking account either by writing a check dated to the borrower’s payday or by giving the lender electronic authorization to debit the account on pay...

“President Biden absolutely has the authority to cancel student debt,” said Ashley Harrington, federal advocacy director and senior counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending. “This is the same authority that was used by the Trump administration last year to waive interest and pause payments or for federal borrowers who had federally held loans. That same authority was used later...

In 2012, the Stanford Social Innovation Review reported that 60 percent of low-income neighborhoods in California didn’t have a bank in their vicinity. Astoundingly, according to data generated by the Center for Responsible Lending after the 2008 financial crisis, low-income families sometimes paid as much as $2,000 a year for check-cashing services, and Californians have been spending close to half...

“Extensive research has established that Black borrowers and other borrowers of color tend to have more difficulty in student loan repayment than their white peers because of past and ongoing racial discrimination,” Julia Barnard, a senior researcher at the Center for Responsible Lending, wrote in a policy brief published this summer. “They are also among the communities hit hardest by...