From today’s American Banker:
| By Brendan Pedersen 2 min read |
| Mehrsa Baradaran, a University of California, Irvine, professor and former banking lawyer, has worked hard to close the racial wealth gap and could further such goals as head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, wrote 34 caucus members in a letter to President Biden. She’d be an interesting choice. While a lot of people in banking talk about making banking more accessible, she points out for a lot of people the problem is they don’t have enough money — pretty basic. I wrote about her book How The Other Half Banks” (https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2018/05/03/american-banking-misses-nearly-half-the-country/?sh=654a2d5f6742) Fees are part of the problem, especially NSF, bounced check fees, which could be eliminated as some all digital banks have done, and certainly could be a few cents to reflect actual costs in a digital era. The Fed’s slow development of real-time payments, which they allowed the big banks to stall for several years at an estimated cost to consumers of about $10 billion a year, also does the poor no favor. And the Fed could require payroll payments to be made available real-time — again, several digital banks make them available 2 days before the payment. Anyway, she’s be a great choice for OCC. |
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