Search Results
Report
Aging, Cognition, and Financial Health: Building a Robust System for Older Americans
This paper summarizes a November 2017 conference cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia?s Consumer Finance Institute and the University of Pennsylvania?s Penn Memory Center and Healthy Brain Research Center. As cognitive abilities decline, older adults may make poor financial judgments and become vulnerable to exploitation and fraud. The potential damage to individual finances as well as to the nation?s financial system will increase as the baby boom generation ages into retirement. The goal of the conference was to discuss actions that members of the financial services ...
Discussion Paper
Can Data Sharing Help Financial Institutions Improve the Financial Health of Older Americans?
This paper explores how increased data sharing among financial institutions could improve the financial outcomes of older adults suffering from cognitive impairment. Among the first signs of cognitive impairment in older adults is a decline in financial capacity, which is also a risk factor for abuse or exploitation. Banks and other financial institutions are at the front lines to monitor and detect changes in financial capacity and susceptibility to fraud and abuse. However, industry experts have found that, in many cases, no mechanism exists for financial service providers to communicate ...
Report
Overdraft Use During the Pandemic: Insights from the CFI COVID-19 Survey of Consumers
This research brief examines consumers’ use of checking account overdrafts since the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, using responses gathered from a special module in the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Consumer Finance Institute COVID-19 Survey of Consumers conducted between July 5 and 16, 2021. The overdraft module includes responses from a national sample of 3,615 consumers, 1,054 of whom reported experiencing at least one overdraft charge during the crisis. Respondents provided their demographic and employment characteristics as part of the broader survey. Survey participants ...
Report
How Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected the Supply of Consumer Credit?
For credit card companies and other lenders, the pandemic has created a variety of risks and challenges. This report examines how credit card lenders have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Discussion Paper
Deconstructing Mechanic’s Liens
In this paper, we examine a new data set composed of mechanic’s lien complaints filed in the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia County). Over a 10-year period, 426 mechanic’s liens were filed against 398 single-family properties, which is less than 0.1 percent of single-family properties in Philadelphia. The lien properties in our data set tend to be more expensive, newer, and larger than non-lien properties. About 80 percent of mechanic’s liens are filed by general contractors, with the remainder pursued by a subcontractor. Notably, a 2014 change in Pennsylvania law ...
Report
How Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected the Supply of Consumer Credit?
For credit card companies and other lenders, the pandemic has created a variety of risks and challenges. This report examines how credit card lenders have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Working Paper
One Threshold Doesn’t Fit All: Tailoring Machine Learning Predictions of Consumer Default for Lower-Income Areas
Modeling advances create credit scores that predict default better overall, but raise concerns about their effect on protected groups. Focusing on low- and moderate-income (LMI) areas, we use an approach from the Fairness in Machine Learning literature — fairness constraints via group-specific prediction thresholds — and show that gaps in true positive rates (% of non-defaulters identified by the model as such) can be significantly reduced if separate thresholds can be chosen for non-LMI and LMI tracts. However, the reduction isn’t free as more defaulters are classified as good risks, ...
Discussion Paper
Quantifying Cyber Risk in the Financial Services Industry
The Consumer Finance Institute hosted a workshop in February 2017 featuring James Fox, partner and principal at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and a leading authority on cybersecurity in the financial services industry. He discussed the importance of measuring cyber risk, highlighted some challenges that financial institutions face in measuring cyber risk, and assessed several leading cyber-risk management methodologies. Fox also provided some recommendations for bank exams and insights into how federal agencies might begin to quantify systemic cyber risk. This paper summarizes Fox?s ...
Report
Secured Card Market Update
For more than 40 years, secured credit cards have enabled borrowers with limited or damaged credit histories to obtain credit, often with many of the benefits of traditional, unsecured credit cards. Despite the recent development of alternative credit-building products, the secured card has not been left behind and, in fact, continues to be a focal point of fintech innovation and new product offerings. In this special report, we update previous research by the Consumer Finance Institute on secured cards using data from the country’s largest financial institutions. As of September 2023, ...