CRL in the News

That $28 billion is made up of almost 350,000 loans, most of which are for less than $25,000 each. That lingering debt is creating a burden for the smallest businesses, including many run by minority entrepreneurs, say advocacy groups, community leaders and business owners. Some borrowers who say they meet the criteria for forgiveness are struggling with technical snafus, onerous...

"We must come through for the most vulnerable," said Aracely Panameño, former director of Latino affairs at the Center for Responsible Lending. Advocates are also asking the SBA to rescind a rule denying forgiveness to borrowers who made good-faith errors and eliminate 'gotcha' denials of loan forgiveness due to sudden rule changes.

"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...

“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,” 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...