Banking UP

The day before the “Kardashian Kard” was introduced, I wrote a cautious note on the Huffington Post that said “read the fine print”.  Little did I know that this prepaid card would beat 2 records:

• the product with the highest fees ever
• the prepaid card with the shortest life span: all of 3 weeks

While the shopaholic celebrity sisters did the most damage to themselves, the collateral impact to the prepaid card industry has been pretty widespread, in particular to products intended for teenagers. Since the demise of the “Kard”, many experts and journalists, have published articles extolling the virtues of checking accounts and bashing prepaid cards as generally inappropriate.

In fact, prepaid cards are a better choice than checking accounts for most parents to start transferring financial responsibility to their teens.

The overwhelming majority of checking accounts are intended for a single user. Only a handful of banks, like Wells Fargo, have created dedicated teen checking accounts where the parent and the teen each have their separate online access and privileges to manage the account. Without that kind of dual and hierarchical access, a parent has only two choices: either be the only one to manage the account, or give his or her teen a copy of the username and password needed to access the account. The latter option only works if the parent has no other account with the same bank; a very unlikely situation.

By contrast, prepaid cards built specifically for teens offer parents a supervisory access to load more money, monitor spending, or suspend card privileges when school grades are not good enough.
Also, unlike checking accounts, prepaid cards can’t overdraft.

Prepaid card fees are usually more transparent than checking accounts. Fee schedules are displayed on websites for everyone to see; not so with checking.
And we will likely see a massive increase in checking account fees in 2011, as banks start adjusting to the Frank-Dodd legislation limiting their abilities to charge overdraft protection fees.

Of course, I think that prepaid cards should not be marketed to teenagers by or with celebrities who are not qualified to be financial role models.
Parents can choose instead from a variety of teen-optimized products with low or very low fees like Discover Current, American Express Pass, MasterCard FaceCard, UPside Visa, Visa Buxx, or the PayPal student card.
And keep that username and password for their bank account to themselves.

Payday Lending ... no more

In a recent article published by the Huffington Post, I argued that the days of abusive payday lending might be numbered, now that new online services like BillFloat are appearing at a fraction of the cost.

I also lamented that some prepaid card suppliers were cozying up a bit too much to the payday lenders…
Guess what: this week, prepaid card providers NetSpend and AccountNow are finding themselves sans the iAdvance short-term lines of credit with 3 digit yearly APRs that they were tackling to some of their cards.

The Office of Thrift Supervision asked MetaBank, the originator of the iAdvance product  to stop  offering it.

It is difficult to rejoice when your industry neighbors and competitors are getting hit, because the whole industry gets blemished.
As always, market players should always improve by taking the initiative to create better and cheaper products rather than by shedding existing bad products only when forced to.

Try this:

• go to the Student Cards section of the Visa website
• pick a card
• click on the Apply button

Do you get any hint that you are not eligible if you are less than 21 and don’t have a co-signer on the card or can’t prove that you can repay the debt?
No.
In spite of the CARD Act being in effect since February 22, 2010, banks are just looking the other way. To be fair, maybe they are actually filtering people less than 21 out after enrollment. I did not go all the way through a full enrollment to check.

Wouldn’t the banks have a lot to gain by being upfront and claiming loud and clear that they are OK with not dragging students less than 21 year old further into debt and being happy to comply with the new law?

Instead, it is business as usual for the big banks. Consumer protection? Not their cup of tea. Demonstrating good will and compliance? Naaahh…

I predict a massive consumer exodus from these inconsiderate corporate giants in favor of fair and transparent services offered by innovators.

Banks deserve to be protected… Banks are consumers: they consume our life-spendings when we don’t read the fine-print.

Stephen Colbert interviewing Barney Frank

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Consumer Protection Agency – Barney Frank

I am re-posting here my original Huffington Post entry.

People sacrifice their privacy for financial gain on a regular basis. This trade-off is the foundation of loyalty cards. Every day, I allow SafeWay to track my purchases, and from time to time I get 70 cents off of a box of Kleenex or something similar.

But exposing private information to the world for no apparent gain is stupid. This was made painfully clear today when social networking site Blippy exposed users credit card numbers in Google search results.
Blippy is a viral marketing engine that relies on exhibitionism. It lets people automatically broadcast their purchases, with the idea that their friends will buy the same things. I’m not sure why people want to expose themselves like this. You see, with Blippy, you’re not promised anything in return for all this free advertising and personal exposure.

Worse yet, people put themselves at risk of identity theft. Giving up some privacy and exposing your behavior to one merchant because you want a specific benefit is one thing. But exposing yourself to the entire world is stupid.

Exploiting stupidity has always been a source of business. In fact, Blippy just announced $11 million in funding from August Capital.

There’s so many great things happening because of the Internet. But because of the Internet, exploiting stupidity is more scalable.