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ALTERNATIVE FINANCIAL SERVICE PROVIDERS ASSOCIATION
October 31, 2019
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The Top Halloween Candy In Every State
In anticipation of the 31st, Candystore.com released its self-compiled rankings of the most popular Halloween candy in every state.
According to the bulk candy seller's data, Twix is the top candy in Alaska, Colorado and Rhode Island. The most popular choice in Georgia is Jolly Ranchers, and in New York, it's Hot Tamales. Meanwhile, California is all about Skittles. Hover over the map above to see the winners for your state and see the full list below.
Candystore.com created its rankings based on 12 years of its sales data (from 2007 to 2018) with a focus on the months leading up to Halloween. The online candy seller also collaborated with "major candy manufacturers and distributors" to help determine the most popular candy in each state (and Washington, D.C.), as well as the first and second runners up. (Certain candies are more likely to be sold in bulk and, as a result, may be overrepresented in the lists.)
In addition to the top Halloween candy state rankings, Candystore.com also released a list of the most popular Halloween candy in the U.S. overall.
Read more at YAHOO
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America's Middle Class Is Addicted to a New Kind of Credit
(Bloomberg) -- Explore what's moving the global economy in the new season of the Stephanomics podcast. Subscribe via Pocket Cast or iTunes.
The payday-loan business was in decline. Regulators were circling, storefronts were vanishing and investors were abandoning the industry's biggest companies en masse.
And yet today, just a few years later, many of the same subprime lenders that specialized in the debt are promoting an almost equally onerous type of credit.
It's called the online installment loan, a form of debt with much longer maturities but often the same sort of crippling, triple-digit interest rates. If the payday loan's target audience is the nation's poor, then the installment loan is geared to all those working-class Americans who have seen their wages stagnate and unpaid bills pile up in the years since the Great Recession.
Read more at BLOOMBERG
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The 'Underbanked' Is The Next Trillion-Dollar Opportunity in Fintech
It's expensive to participate in the mainstream financial system if you're poor. Overdraft penalties and banking fees prevent billions of people from accessing the most basic financial tools like savings accounts and lines of credit.
This has created the greatest market opportunity in fintech-low-cost, high-tech financial services for the underbanked, said Angela Strange, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, during a panel at the Forbes Under 30 Summit in Detroit on Monday.
"This opportunity [to serve the underbanked] is massive. Depending on which numbers you believe there are anywhere from 2 to 3 billion people worldwide," said Strange.
Historically, traditional banking institutions have done a bad job serving these customers with an affordable product, which has created two totally separate financial services landscapes in the U.S., said Strange. Read more at FORBES
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Subprime lenders pivot from payday to online installment loans
- Many of the same subprime lenders who specialized in payday loans are now turning to online installment loans, which have longer maturities and high interest rates, Bloomberg reports.
- This time lenders, such as Enova International (ENVA) and Elevate Credit (ELVT +0.2%), are appealing to working-class borrowers rather than the country's poor.
- Subprime borrowers now owe about $50B on installment products, according to credit reporting company TransUnion.
- Regulations aimed at payday loans, which are generally small, short-term loans, may not apply to the online installment loans, which can range to $10,000 or more.
- Some states like California and Virginia capped interest rates on loans below $2,500 in an effort to protect payday borrowers.
- Subprime lender Enova's outstanding installment loans, though, averaged $2,123 in Q2 vs. $420 for short-term loans, according to a filing.
Read more at SEEKING ALPHA
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Prospects Rising for Lower-Cost Small-Dollar Loans
Millions of consumers could save billions of dollars with alternatives to payday borrowing
The nation's three federal bank regulators-the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC), the Federal Reserve Board, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC)-are working together to find ways to improve access to small-dollar loans, raising hopes that more banks could offer affordable small installment loans that cost about six times less than payday loans.
To date, most banks have not offered small installment loans in part because of concerns that without explicit approval, they could be subject to future regulatory action. An announced agreement on rules for such lending could substantially boost the market for affordable alternatives to payday and similar high-cost loans. Twelve million American adults use payday loans annually. Average borrowers earn about $30,000 per year, and most use costly payday loans to cover ordinary living expenses over the course of months, not unexpected emergencies over the course of weeks. Bank regulators are examining ways to make less burdensome alternatives more widely available.
Read more at Pew Charitable Trusts
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Improve risk and lending strategies across the customer lifecycle with deeper data and analytic insights
As a financial institution in today's competitive lending marketplace, you move at an extremely fast pace in an effort to identify and retain the right consumers for your business, keep up with competitors and consistently improve risk management, all in a strict, complex regulatory environment. You require solutions that allow you to operate and adapt at maximum capacity. We provide solutions across every aspect of the lending lifecycle-customer acquisition and engagement, fraud and ID management, retention and recovery-with every step focused on mitigating risk.
We are dedicated to providing you with innovative ways to help you make better and smarter decisions for your business. One such innovation is our CreditVision® solution suite. CreditVision uses enriched data and analytics to provide a more comprehensive view of consumer performance.
Read more at TRANSUNION
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LoanPaymentPro™ (LPP) is a revolutionary Merchant Services and technology-driven Payment Processor servicing the debt repayment industry.
LPP was developed by experienced lenders for lenders utilizing proprietary patent pending technology to develop the only compliant and cost effective Bankcard, ACH and RCC/Check21 acceptance platform for Storefront Brick & Mortar and Online Lenders.
Exclusive to the short-term consumer and alternative lending industries for: Installment Loans, Title Loans, Personal Loans, Personal Lines of Credit, Student Loans, Military Loans, Subprime Loans, Lease-to-Purchase and Rent-to-Own (RTO). We also have revolutionized the way payments are processed for Online Lenders, including MPL (Marketplace Lenders) and Lending Platforms.
LoanPaymentPro provides a proprietary advanced form of its own Payment Validation and Verification function (think enhanced version of Zero-Dollar Authorization (ZDA).
Read more at LoanPaymentPro
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Transform Your Business with Data and Payment Instruments
The rise of fintech technologies, now, more than ever is affecting consumer behaviors.
Today, consumers possess multiple bank accounts, utilizing a wide array of payment instruments and high frequency usage of debit cards, (especially virtual, private labeled, and those linked to rewards). This behavior adds a layer of complexity to the measurement and management of risks associated with extending credit and issuing financial services. Additionally, the successful collection of funds, due to regulatory changes and the aforementioned consumer behavior, has become increasingly difficult to automate and manage for many businesses. The two factors contributing to the remediation of this problem, have long been utilized separately, data and payment instruments (bank accounts and debit cards).
ValidiFI has developed a disruptive technology, the Payment Risk Optimizer (PRO) platform, that leverages data and payment instruments for the purposes of improving payment processing success rates, efficiency and compliance.
Read more at VALIDIFI
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Critics say Kansas needs to change its payday loan rules
Topeka - Maria Galvan used to make about $25,000 a year. She didn't qualify for welfare, but she still had trouble meeting her basic needs.
"I would just be working just to be poor and broke," she said. "It would be so frustrating."
When things got bad, the single mother and Topeka resident took out a payday loan. That meant borrowing a small amount of money at a high interest rate, to be paid off as soon as she got her next check.
A few years later, Galvan found herself strapped for cash again. She was in debt, and garnishments were eating up a big chunk of her paychecks. She remembered how easy it was to get that earlier loan: walking into the store, being greeted with a friendly smile, getting money with no judgment about what she might use it for.
Read more at Lawrence Journal-World
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Ten Years Of Payments Innovation And Reinvention
The mood in the air at the start of the 2010s was different from the one that preceded the start of the 2000s. The shift from 1999 to 2000 was (mostly) a joyous and cheerful environment. Sure, there was a slight lingering concern that a glitch in how the world's PCs were programmed might accidentally bring on the tech-pocalypse affectionately referred to as Y2K. However, most people assumed that was survivable, and that the new millennia - powered by the emerging, mysterious technology known as "the internet" - was going to be a great place to live. When people asked "what's next?" in the year 1999, they were generally pretty excited to hear the answer.
The world of 2009 was starkly different, a far less optimistic place. Though the Great Recession was technically "over" by the middle of 2009, few people living in the real economy felt that fact in their daily lives. Read more at PYMNTS.COM
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Supreme Court Review Could Undercut CFPB Enforcement
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau could lose leverage in enforcement negotiations as the Supreme Court considers whether its leadership structure is unconstitutional.
The CFPB has said it will be business as usual as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a challenge to the independent agency's single-director, whom the president can only fire for cause, rather than at will.
But federal judges have already put stays on the bureau's enforcement litigation or closed cases altogether pending a Supreme Court decision in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau- which hasn't been scheduled for oral arguments yet.
That delay could give companies a leg up when negotiating the terms of CFPB civil investigative demands or even proposed settlements for alleged consumer law violations, regardless of how the Supreme Court eventually rules. Read more at BLOOMBERG LAW
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Advance America Becomes First to Offer Installment Loans under New Florida Law
ORLANDO, FL, October 25, 2019 - Advance America, the country's leading consumer lender, recently began offering Installment Loan services to its customers in Florida - the first provider to do so under a new law passed by the Florida legislature in 2018. Florida consumers can now borrow regulated installment loans up to $1,000 in Advance America's Florida store locations and online. Loans are repaid over multiple payments, with repayment terms of 60 to 90 days.
"We are excited to offer installment loans to Floridians," said Mike Rhodes, Vice President of Operations for Advance America. "Our customers regularly tell us they would benefit from having a choice between short-term and longer-term loan options for managing their financial obligations, and now we can help meet that need." Read more at ADVANCE AMERICA
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ACE Cash Express employees and customers recently raised $55,634 for Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation during our annual Give a Little Campaign!
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ALTERNATIVE FINANCIAL SERVICE PROVIDERS ASSOCIATION
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| Alternative Financial Service Providers Association
757.737.4088 315 Tuscarora St., Lewiston, NY 14092
[email protected]
www.afspassociation.com |
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