An analysis of financial institutions in Black-majority communities: Black borrowers and depositors face considerable challenges in accessing banking services
Introduction
Achieving the American dream—the opportunity to succeed, to provide food and shelter for family members, education for children, hope for a better life, and freedom of opportunity— requires capital. But, in the United States, access to capital for individuals and business owners is uneven based on race. The racial wealth gap remains significant. In 2019, the median net worth of a typical white household, $188,200, was 7.8 times greater than that of a typical Black household, $24,100 (Bhutta et al., 2020). Most houses are bought with a mortgage and most businesses rely on credit to fund their expansion.1
This report documents that, at a local level, there are stark contrasts in access to credit for African Americans: Interest rates on business loans, bank branch density, local banking concentration in the residential mortgage market, and the growth of local businesses are markedly different in majority Black neighborhoods. Several policy approaches are suggested: First, a more granular approach to banking supervision may be needed; microgeographic data in 2021 provides a much closer look at the banking practices of major banks and nonbank lenders than in 1977, when the Community Reinvestment Act was signed into law. Second, the number of African American minority depository institutions (MDIs) has been declining and policy or private-sector support is likely needed (Pike, 2021). Third, as the mobility of Americans is overall declining, geography matters more than ever (Molloy et al 2017). A lack of credit hinders investments in better homes, better schools, better local infrastructure such as roads and public transport, better amenities, and better health care.
Section 1 reviews the history of credit policies. Section 2 presents granular evidence on inequalities in access to banking services, including bank deposits. Section 3 focuses on residential mortgage credit supply. Section 4 turns to small business lending. Section 5 suggests a 21st century agenda for lawmakers and academic researchers.
1. Historical context
Removal of Africans from their rich commercial environments in kingdoms including Ghana, Mali and Songhai through the slave trade between the 14th and 18th centuries did not destroy their proclivity for business and trade (Ammons, 1996). Since the time when Black people in America secured the right to earn capital for their labor following emancipation, they have faced systemic financial discrimination with respect to banking access and fees. Over a century ago, racism and segregation required Black people to pool their resources to support each other, and Black-owned banks played a vital role in the economic health of Black communities (Gerena, 2007). On October 17, 1888, Capitol Savings Bank in Washington, D.C. became the first bank organized and operated by African Americans (Todd, 2019). Within four years of opening, the bank’s deposits had grown to over $300,000 (Partnership for Progress). Between the end of the Reconstruction era and the beginning of the Great Depression, over 130 Black-owned banks opened, providing capital to Black entrepreneurs, businesses, and prospective homeowners (Gerena, 2007).
In the early- to mid-20th century, the federal government took on a large role in the stabilization and financing of the home mortgage market in the United States. In response to the housing market problems brought on by the Great Depression, the Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC) purchased and refinanced over one-tenth of all non-farm U.S. mortgages by 1936. The HOLC subsequently created color-coded maps in 200 cities to better understand the risk of the mortgages with the guidance and expertise of local real estate market professionals that reflected long held patterns of racial discrimination, a process that came to be known as redlining. Shortly thereafter, the recently created Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which by the middle of the century covered the insurance of over one-third of the U.S. mortgage market, crafted their own redlining maps to guide decisionmaking. In tandem, the FHA and HOLC helped lock in existing patterns of racial discrimination in the U.S. housing market (Fishback et al, 2020). This period coincided with the Second Great Migration, which witnessed millions of Black people migrating from the rural South to the cities of the North and Midwest. Given the existing market discrimination that non-minority owned banks practiced, their race-based exclusion of Black people from the mortgage market provided an opportunity for minority-owned banks to provide service to a much larger market of Black migrants looking to purchase homes and start businesses. However, Black migrants faced labor market competition with new European immigrants and legacy Black residents in addition to labor market discrimination, which made it difficult for minority-owned banks to finance economic development efforts (Ammons, 1996).
During the seven year period between 1983 and 1989 the number of Black owned banks declined 22%, while the total number of banks in the U.S. declined by only 12% (Price, 1990). Black-owned banks make capital more accessible because they approve a higher percentage of loans to Black applicants than other banks, but their impact is limited by their low numbers and often precarious financial standing (Burton, Scheck, and West, 2020). Compared with white-owned banks, minority-owned banks are more likely to rely more heavily on government deposits, and therefore hold fewer loans and more liquid assets (Price, 1990).
In 2008, the Partnership for Progress was launched by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve to help promote and preserve minority-owned banks. But despite its efforts, the number of Black-owned banks has declined, from 48 in 2001 to 18 in 2020. (McKinney, 2019). Banking access in the Black community has not only been limited by the decrease in the number of Black-owned banks, but by an overall decrease in the number of banks in majority Black neighborhoods. Since 2010, the number of banks in majority-black neighborhoods decreased 14.6%, with JPMorgan shrinking its branch footprint in majority-black neighborhoods by 22.8% from 2010 to 2018, compared to a decline of just 0.2% in the rest of the U.S. (Fox, et al., 2019).
The FDIC defines minority depository institutions (MDIs) as federally insured depository institutions for which either “(1) 51% or more of the voting stock is owned by minority individuals; or (2) a majority of the board of directors is minority and the community that the institution serves is predominantly minority. Ownership must be by U.S. citizens or permanent legal U.S. residents to be counted in determining minority ownership.” As of December 31, 2020, the FDIC listed 142 Minority Depository Institutions located in 29 states, Guam, and Puerto Rico with cumulative assets of $287 billion. For context, TIAA had $280 billion in total general account assets in the first quarter of 2021. Of the 142 MDIs, there were only 18 Black or African American owned banks with combined assets of $4.58 billion. The minority status of those 142 financial institutions is presented in Table 1.
2. Racial inequalities in access to banking services and deposits
Today bank customers can access their accounts and perform many banking transactions via the internet. According to Business Insider, this year there will be 196.8 million digital banking users in the U.S., making up 75.4% of the population. But for those who lack financial resources, internet access, or transportation required to bridge the physical and digital distance, brick-and-mortar bank branches are vital—particularly for low-income, inner-city areas (Hegerty, 2015). Racial discrimination and various types of market failure have led to banking and credit deserts in underserved urban and rural communities (Van Tol, 2020). Ergundor (2010) finds a positive correlation between bank branch presence in low-income neighborhoods and mortgage loan originations; that favorable effects of bank branch presence gets stronger as the branch gets closer to the neighborhood; and that in the small-business-lending market, relationships are associated with greater availability of credit.
According to the Fed, in 2019 the majority of U.S. adults had a bank account and relied on traditional banks or credit unions to meet their banking needs, but gaps in banking access existed. Six percent of American adults were unbanked meaning that they did not have a checking, savings, or money market account. Approximately 40% of unbanked adults used an alternative financial service during 2018— such as a money order, check cashing service, pawn shop loan, auto title loan, payday loan, paycheck advance, or tax refund advance. Unbanked and underbanked rates were higher among lower-income households, less-educated households, Black households, Latino or Hispanic households, American Indian or Alaska Native households, working-age disabled households, and households with unstable incomes (FDIC, 2020; Rhine et al., 2006). Hence, the continuing decline in the number of MDIs is especially disconcerting. Table 2 shows the banking status for Black, Latino or Hispanic and white Americans in 2019.
The unbanked and underbanked rates in 2019 were highest for Black adults—making it more difficult for them to accumulate savings. According to 2020 survey data from Bankrate, minorities, millennials, and Northeasterners reported paying higher bank fees. The data showed that the average checking account holder at a bank or credit union paid $8 per month in fees, including routine service charges, ATM fees and overdraft penalties, but fees paid varied by race. White checking account holders reported paying the lowest amount in monthly bank fees, $5, compared to $12 for Black account holders and $16 for Latino or Hispanic account holders.
Majority Black and Latino or Hispanic neighborhoods have fewer options when it comes to financial services than majority white neighborhoods. In 2017, majority Black ZIP codes located in metropolitan areas with over 250,000 people had a median dollar-deposit-based Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) of 4,584 while non-majority Black ZIP codes had a median HHI of 3,106, where the higher score indicates less competition.2 Similarly, majority Latino or Hispanic ZIP codes had a median HHI of 3,580 compared to a median HHI of 3,157 in non-majority Latino or Hispanic ZIP codes. Access to a wider array of financial services can mean lower interest rates and higher savings rates as banks compete to attract a customer base. Figure 1, below, shows the relationship between the share of Black, Latino or Hispanic, and white residents in a ZIP code and banking competition (as measured by HHI) in ZIP codes located in metropolitan areas with over 250,000 people and after controlling for population. As the share of Black and Latino or Hispanic residents increases, so does the HHI, meaning less banking competition. The reverse is true for the share of white residents in a zip code.
In a world where services, both financial and non-financial, are becoming increasingly available online, one might argue that the physical presence of a brick-and-mortar bank branch in a neighborhood is no longer necessary. Indeed, the biennial FDIC Survey of Household Use of Banking and Financial Services found that the share of banked households in metropolitan areas that used a bank teller as their primary method of accessing their bank account fell from 28% in 2015 to 21% in 2019, as use of mobile and online banking surged. However, the same survey showed that lower-income and less-educated households were twice as likely to use bank branches, and the same was true for elderly adults. Additionally, 23% of urban banked households visited a bank branch 10 or more times a month, demonstrating that a significant number of households still use this service.
While fintech lenders have increased their market share in recent years by increasing the speed of service delivery and efficiency, there is no evidence that they have expanded access to financial services to low-income borrowers in the mortgage market (Fuster et al, 2019). However, during the pandemic, Black-owned businesses were 12 percentage points more likely to obtain PPP loans from fintech lenders, while small banks were much less likely to lend to Black businesses. Howell et al (2021) find that this disparity is largely due to racial discrimination and that when banks automate their lending process, thereby reducing human involvement, their rate of lending to Black businesses increases, especially in localities with high racial animus.
Yet, fintech should not be considered a comprehensive solution to racial disparities in access to capital. There remains a large share of households that lack access to broadband in the U.S. In cities such as Baltimore, over 40% of households or some 96,000 households lack a wired broadband connection, and some 75,000 Baltimore City households, or one in three, do not have either a desktop or laptop computer, making online services more difficult to access (Horrigan, 2020). This is exacerbated by the fact that, as shown in Figure 2, counties with less banking competition (as measured by the Herfindahl Hirschman Index) also have lower shares of households with wired broadband connections.
Finally, the continued importance of brick-and-mortar branches is further evidenced by the crucial role played by local banks in distributing PPP loans during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic (Li et al, 2020). These more locally oriented banks were better able to discover potential customers in need due to relationship banking and their ability to understand local risk profiles more accurately. In the early stages of the pandemic, counties with the highest numbers of Black-owned businesses received some of the lowest shares of PPP loan coverage, often falling below 20% of eligible firms, possibly reflecting the lack of existing banking relationships in those communities (Mills and Battisto, 2020). Minority-owned depository institutions could play a crucial role in fostering stronger relationships between Black entrepreneurs and the financial system.
From 2010 to 2021, the U.S. lost over 15,500 bank branches. By 2021, majority Black census tracts were much less likely to have a bank branch than non-majority Black neighborhoods. Figure 3 shows a dot density map of Philadelphia census tracts and the share of residents that are Black in 2021. A high number of banks are clustered in the city’s central business district, but immediately outside that area, the city’s majority Black neighborhoods have few, if any, bank branches. Census tracts with a higher share of white residents and tracts that are more suburban have a higher number of branches. Between 2010 and 2021, non-majority Black neighborhoods were more likely to experience a decline in the number of bank branches, but only because they were much more likely to have a bank branch in their neighborhood in the first place. After controlling for the initial number of bank branches in 2010, census tracts with higher shares of Black residents were more likely to experience a bank branch closure by 2021. Figure 4 shows this relationship in the six metropolitan areas of Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and St. Louis.
The financial services industry has expanded beyond banks and credit unions, which are regulated primarily at the federal level. Banks are regulated by the Federal Reserve, while federally chartered credit unions are regulated by the National Credit Union Administration, and state-chartered credit unions are regulated at the state level (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco). While the majority of Americans complete their basic financial transactions at banks and credit unions, consumers who operate outside of the formal banking system may be more likely to utilize informal, alternative financial service providers including payday lenders (Dunham, 2018).
Payday loans, cash advance loans, check advance loans, post-dated check loans, and deferred deposit loans are short-term high interest rate loans provided by check cashers, finance companies, and others to a clientele that mainly consists of low- and moderate-income working people who have bank accounts, but who lack credit cards, have poor credit histories, or have reached their credit limit (Federal Trade Commission). According to the St. Louis Fed, in 2019 the average interest rate on the average payday loan is 391%, compared to 17.8% for the average credit card, and 10.3% for the average personal loan from a commercial bank.
The FICO scoring system, created in 1989, was designed to assess the creditworthiness of consumers (Shift, 2021). Scores range from 300 to 850. The FICO credit score is used by financial institutions as a qualifier to assess financial health. It is not easy for individuals to improve their financial health once their credit score is damaged. Black people are more likely to be excluded from conventional financial services based on their credit scores. Figure 6 shows credit scores by race for 2021. Because Black people are more likely to have lower credit scores, they are more likely to be unbanked or underbanked, causing them to pay higher service fees to receive financial services and making them more likely to depend on alternative financial institutions. Financial institutions rely on FICO credit scores as a screening tool to protect themselves from financial loss due to asymmetric information. However, developing alternative screening methods is necessary to reduce the disparity in banking access and fees.
Black and Latino or Hispanic people are more likely than white people to depend on high interest financial services like check cashing counters and payday lenders because there are fewer banks in Black and Latino or Hispanic neighborhoods. Increasing access to banking services could save Black and Latino or Hispanic Americans up to $40,000 over their lifetime (Moise, 2019). The percentage of Black adults who are not digitally literate, 22%, is twice the percentage of white adults, 11%. Both the disparity in access to banks and digital literacy threaten their ability to grow wealth in the digital economy.
3. Racial inequalities in access to mortgage credit
In the U.S., homeownership is the most common avenue to wealth building and intergenerational wealth transfers. Racial inequality in access to home mortgage loans has a long and troubled history in the country that includes redlining (Aaronson et al. 2017, Fishback et al. 2020), geographically targeted predatory lending (Carr et al. 2001; Agarwal et al. 2014), discrimination in lending standards (Ross et al. 2002), and racial covenants (Gotham, 2000; Sood et al., 2019).3,4
Mortgage lending files collected via the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act display very substantial differences in approval rates, as mortgage lending applications of Black American borrowers are two to three times more likely to be denied. Munnell et al. (1996) compares applicants with similar observable measures of creditworthiness and finds that race plays a statistically and economically significant role in application decisions.5 The authors also note that disparities are likely underestimated, as the creditworthiness controls themselves may be the outcome of other forces described in the previous section. There is no doubt a need for modern studies that identify lending disparities using the granularity of modern datasets.
Mapping the geography of mortgage lending reveals new insights and limitations of CRA examinations. The four maps in Figure 8 below suggest that residents of Baltimore City had access to fewer lenders than other residents of metropolitan Baltimore. The map presents the HHI for each census tract. Again, fewer lenders were present in Baltimore City’s majority Black census tracts than majority white and suburban tracts.
The four maps in Figure 7 suggest that, between 1995 and 2012, residents of the city of Baltimore were granted smaller loans in proportion to their income. The Loan-to-Income (LTI) ratio, a measure of lending standards, is depicted for each census tract. It suggests that lenders have more stringent lending standards in Baltimore City and especially in the city’s majority Black neighborhoods where the LTI ratio is the lowest.
This raises significant questions about the appropriate geographic level of the assessment area of CRA examinations. In a recent report, Johns Hopkins researchers6 describe that large bank lenders are typically assessed based on their lending to low-income census tracts at the state level, rather than at the more granular city or county levels. Channeling the flow of mortgage credit to specific neighborhoods and demographics is key, as across-the-broad increases in mortgage credit supply to all racial groups lead to the growth of urban segregation (Ouazad et al, 2016; Ouazad et al. 2019).
The four panels present maps of the dollar weighted loan-to-income ratio by census tract. Darker colors correspond to lower loan-to-income ratios.
These four figures present the level of competition in census-tract level mortgage origination. The colors correspond to the Herfindahl index (HHI) in mortgage origination, and lighter colors correspond to lower levels of competition. The four panels suggest lower levels of competition in central census tracts.
4. Racial inequalities in access to small business loans
A lower level of business ownership and business assets among Black households is a contributing factor to the racial wealth gap. Limited access to capital is the most important factor that constrains the establishment, expansion and growth of Black-owned businesses (Fairlie, Robb, and Hinson, 2010). According to a 2020 report from The Brookings Institution, “Black people represent 12.7% of the U.S. population but only 4.3% of the nation’s 22.2 million business owners.” Black entrepreneurs face barriers to opening businesses with respect to access to credit. Henderson et al. (2015) examined the influence of racial and gender-related factors on access to business credit lines and found that Black-owned startups receive lower than expected business credit scores and that white-owned startups with the same firm characteristics as Black-owned startups are treated more favorably.
Blanchflower, Levine and Zimmerman (2003) found that between 1993 and 1998, Black-owned small businesses were about twice as likely to be denied credit even after controlling for differences in creditworthiness and other factors, suggesting that the racial disparity in credit availability was likely caused by discrimination. Fairlie, Robb, and Robinson (2020) explored racial differences in capital market outcomes associated with launching a new business and found that Black entrepreneurs are less likely to apply for loans than white entrepreneurs because they expect to be denied credit, even when they have a good credit history.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the challenges faced by minority-owned businesses (Marte, 2021). Data from the 2020 Small Business Credit Survey found that 92% of Black-owned businesses reported experiencing financial challenges in 2020, compared to 79% for white-owned firms. According to a survey conducted by Reuters, Black business owners were more likely than any other group to suffer financially during the pandemic—38% borrowed money from a friend or relative, 25% worked a second job, and 74% dipped into their personal funds to cover costs.
Such documented evidence of credit constraints has significant consequences for the availability of local services in Black neighborhoods. For instance, Beaulac et al. (2009) documents the phenomenon of food deserts across the United States. Figure 9 below displays the important differences in the density of local services across Atlanta using the National Establishment Time Series (NETS) dataset. Such a dataset provides the geocoded location of establishments, their sales, and number of employees. Benchmarking using administrative data suggests that NETS is an accurate portrayal of the cross-section distribution of establishments (Barnatchez et al. 2017). Figure 9 suggests a significantly lower density in majority Black neighborhoods of Atlanta.
Credit constraints are likely to play a role in this uneven distribution of economic activity. The upper-right panel of Figure 10 shows a positive correlation between the interest rate on business and commercial loans and the share Black in a census tract. Interest rates are insensitive to racial composition for the share of Black residents in a neighborhood below 25%, and then grow to be 1 percentage point higher in Black neighborhoods.
This may lead to an unrealized potential for business expansion in Black neighborhoods: Figure 11 presents a set of graphs displaying a negative relationship between the number, sales, and employees of service firms and the fraction of Black residents.
This map presents the geocoded location of services in the Atlanta metropolitan area. The boundary is the set of census tracts where the fraction of Black residents is greater than 80%.
The upper-right panel presents the tract-level average interest rate on loans with a commercial or business purpose. Each dot is a census tract of the Atlanta metropolitan area. The average interest rate is the dollar-weighted average. The upper-left panel presents the number of employees in service firms by percentage Black. The lower-left panel presents a similar scatter plot for the dollar sales. The lower-right panel focuses on the number of service firms. Services are the same as those for Figure 8: restaurant and bars, offices of physicians, banks, grocery stores, cinemas, art galleries, and other personal services.
5. Conclusion: A new agenda
New detailed microdata provide descriptive evidence that Black borrowers and depositors are substantially more constrained in their access to banking services. This is visible across a range of services, including deposits, residential mortgage credit, and business loans. This report suggests a new legislative agenda and a new research agenda. First, supervisory tools developed in the aftermath of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act do not seem adapted to the “big data” of the 21st century. Better information means it’s easier than ever to identify paths to improvement for bank and nonbank lenders. Second, researchers can observe large parts of the balance sheet and income statement of depository institutions, allowing for an understanding of the match between the savings of Black depositors and the flow of loans to Black residents and businesses. This should spark a research agenda that makes financial data science more useful than ever to address 21st century inequalities.
Related Content
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Focus on bank supervision, not just bank regulation
Introduction
Last month, the Biden administration made headlines nominating Cornell Law School Professor Saule Omarova to serve as Comptroller of the Currency, a position from which she would oversee the National Banking System. Omarova’s nomination has drawn sharp criticism from the financial services industry, placing her alongside other Biden appointments within financial regulation such as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission Gary Gensler and director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Rohit Chopra. In each case, the appointments represent a sea change, embracing an approach to regulation that starkly differs from the priorities of the Trump administration. These existing appointments and nominations set the stage for the financial regulatory appointments that the administration has not yet made, including three vacancies on the Federal Reserve — the Fed Chair, Vice Chair for Supervision, and a member of Fed’s Board of Governors —and vacancies at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), among others.
Debate over these key personnel focus on different visions of regulation, the rules political appointees write that apply to the entire financial system. These include what financial regulation should do about climate change, how it should support under-represented minorities, how it can ensure financial stability, and much more. But the biggest piece of the puzzle is still missing: these agencies and appointments also control the supervision of the financial system, not just its regulation. The difference between these two concepts is very important. If regulation sets the rules of the road, supervision is the process that ensures obedience to these rules (and sometimes to norms that exist outside these rules entirely). Regulation is the highly choreographed process of generating public engagement in the creation of rules. Supervision is the mostly secret process of managing the public and private responsibilities over the risks that the financial system generates.
Political groups organize in support or opposition of various regulatory nominees usually on the basis of the candidates’ perceived regulatory priorities. This is important, but this exclusive focus is a mistake. We, all of us, should pay far more attention to the candidates’ vision and philosophy of supervision. This part of the public vetting is all the more important given the culture of secrecy that surrounds bank supervision. If the public is going to have a say in the kind of supervisory system we should have, then the appointment process is likely the first and last chance to do it.
The question for senators who provide advice and consent necessary to obtain these jobs and for the general public in vetting these candidates for appointment should focus on how these nominees view the tradeoffs inherent in the supervisory process wholly independent of financial regulation. It should focus on what they will do—now—to maintain the culture of supervision or to change it.
What Supervision Means
The idea that supervision and regulation should receive separate priorities is not new. More recently, in contemporary debates, some view supervision as part of a long-standing settlement of monetary questions of special relevance during the Civil War, others as the implementation of regulatory priorities, others as a kind of regulatory monitoring. We view it differently. While many of these conceptions of supervision capture elements of what makes this mode of public governance so unusual, the full picture is more historically contingent and flexibly comprehensive. In our view, supervision is the management of residual risk at the boundary of public and private, the space where private banks and public officials sometimes spar, sometimes collaborate, over responsibility over the financial system. Because risks in the financial system are constantly evolving, supervision has done the same.
In our work on the history of bank supervision, we offer a typology that captures this range of functions. The typology has two parts. First, supervision functions as a distinct mechanism of legal obedience—a means by which government or private actors seek to alter bank behavior. These mechanisms can be displayed on two axes, between public and private mechanisms, which require the exercise of coercive and non-coercive power.
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In this sense, supervision represents a choice for policymakers, distinct from other alternatives. It is a choice, as the graphic indicates, which authorizes government officials to exercise substantial discretion about how to alter behavior.
Relatedly, what supervision looks like on the ground depends almost entirely on what supervisors think they are trying to accomplish, self-conceptions that divide not only according to an external logic of coercion vs. non-coercion and public vs. private but also an internal one. These self-conceptions operate within a framework with axes spanning punitive to collaborative and from retrospective to prospective, as summarized in Figure 2.
Together, the two typologies indicate a range of possible supervisory actions (external) and the motivations behind such actions (internal). They imply constant trade-offs that supervisors must make as they share risk management responsibilities with participants in the private sector. Despite the extraordinary flexibility that this model of supervision permits, supervisors cannot hold all ground at once and be all things to all people. They must choose and in choosing navigate the often conflicting and sometimes contradictory policy goals placed by Congress on bank supervisors: between safety and soundness and firm competitiveness, between consumer protection and facilitation of financial innovation, between punitive and collaborative approaches, and many others.
When a new public official is appointed to lead one of the major elements of bank supervision, she inherits a toolbox with many different kinds of tools. Members of Congress should ask nominees which tools they prefer for which kinds of jobs, how they view these trade-offs and what they would prioritize, and how they think about alternatives. A short-hand method is to listen for the metaphors nominees use to describe supervision. Do nominees conceive of supervisors as cops on the beat? As fire wardens? As referees and umpires? As compliance officers? As management consultants? Are banks their customers? What tools will they use in accomplishing this vision? What flexibility will they use and under what circumstances?
Who Supervisors Are
Because supervision is fundamentally flexible and evolving, personnel decisions are vital. Supervisory officials—independent of legislative and regulatory processes—constantly reshape the methods, tools, and rationales of supervision in relation to their understandings of financial risk and their evaluation of relevant policy tradeoffs.
History provides rich examples of this process. Looking back to the nineteenth century, comptrollers, and later officials at the Federal Reserve and FDIC, created supervisory bureaucracies with little congressional guidance on how those bureaucracies should be structured. In doing so, they crafted supervisory tools, like standardized examination forms or “schools” of supervision complete with simulated banks getting practice exams, which guided frontline agency staff and bankers through the thicket of managing residual financial risk. Sometimes appointees proved too lenient or too eager to encourage bank chartering and growth at the expense of systemic safety. At other times they proved too harsh, making a theatrical display of cracking down on shoddy bank oversight and in doing so potentially undermining agency credibility with bankers who doubt supervisors’ intentions.
Two recent examples highlight the ways conceptions of supervisory purpose translate into agency action. First, the CFBP emerged in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis in part because existing supervisory agencies tended to sacrifice consumer protection. In its early years, the architects of the CFPB adopted Senator Elizabeth Warren’s “cop on the beat” approach, bringing enforcement lawyers to routine exams even when there was no enforcement action pending. Thus, while other agencies tended to have a collaborative and prospective view of consumer protection—identifying potential problems and helping bankers navigate past them—the CFPB was looking to punish past mistakes and ensure compliance in the future. Bankers struggled to reconcile the agency’s seemingly contradictory positions. The enforcement attorneys left the examination teams, but the tone set from the top continued to be decisively important. Under Democrat Richard Cordray, the CFPB leveled more than $5.5 million in fines a day compared to slightly less than $2 million per day under Trump appointee Kathy Kraninger. The CFPB used civil enforcement aggressively and then didn’t.
Second, the design and implementation of stress tests for the nation’s largest, most systemically important banks has also undergone significant change at the hands of Federal Reserve appointees Dan Tarullo and Randy Quarles. There is much that is purely regulatory about these changes—the pace of stress tests, the reliance on qualitative versus quantitative metrics. But stress tests are ultimately a supervisory activity leaving a huge amount of space for supervisors to shape individual responses to idiosyncratic factors. The question for a new head of an agency is not simply what regulatory rules will govern stress tests but how that official thinks supervisory interactions with individual banks through the stress test process should occur.
Finally, changes in the approach to and methods of supervision seldom spring fully-formed from the head of a Senate-confirmed nominee. Rather, supervisory officials must also develop plans for recruiting, training, and retaining a superb corps of supervisors who can be independent of banks but also expert at managing those relationships to alter bank behavior. In doing so, they face two challenges. First, political appointees necessarily take the helm of an unwieldy ship. Frontline supervisors are in place and working hard in offices across the country. They have methods, routines, and ingrained expectations developed over years of experience and training by distant political appointees whose visions and ideologies of supervision may have been repudiated by a recent election. Supervisory leaders must have a strategy for learning their agencies’ bearing and changing course as necessary. They must do so, secondly, while holding onto experienced staff who may be attracted to the lure of more lucrative private-sector jobs. Retaining and retraining staff is a signature challenge of bank supervision. Senators should inquire about nominees’ plans for doing so.
Ten questions policymakers should ask
If Biden administration officials and senators heed our calls to take supervision seriously, then there are a number of questions they should direct to candidates and nominees alike.
What do you see as the purpose of supervision? What is the supervisory agency’s primary role? What, if any, secondary goals would you emphasize?
How would you plan to balance the inherent trade-offs between these goals? How would this balance differ—if at all—from your predecessor?
Which supervisory tools do you view as most important for accomplishing these goals? How would you use these tools differently than your predecessors?
How do you plan to learn about the existing supervisory culture at your agency? How do you plan to realign that culture around your goals?
How will you recruit, train, and retain supervisory staff?
How will you organize your office such that regulatory and supervisory functions inform each other but do not absorb each other?
How do you plan to work with other bank supervisory agencies—at the federal level, internationally, and in the states? Do you see these other agencies as competitors or collaborators?
What is the relationship between supervision and enforcement in your agency? How will you manage the process through which supervisors learn sensitive information that may be relevant to an enforcement action but that may also be an opportunity to change bank behavior without enforcement?
How will you ensure that bank supervisors do not unduly adopt the point of view of the banks supervised?
How will you ensure that bank supervisors understand the point of view of the banks supervised?
Although regulatory issues such as climate change, federal bank chartering, diversity, and fintech dominate conversations about regulatory appointments, a lack of focus on supervisory issues comes at a great cost to public governance and financial stability. Fights over regulation that ignore supervision may obscure these critical issues more than they illuminate. Bank supervision is an unusual set of institutions, homegrown in the United States and refined by federalism, financial crisis, and historical accident. Supervision remains the most important tool in the federal administrative toolkit for changing the way we understand the business of banking. The process of public governance should give it its due.
The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment. A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.
Sean Vanatta is a Lecturer in U.S. Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow, and an un-paid member of the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research (FRASER) Advisory Board. The authors did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. Other than the aforementioned, they are currently not an officer, director, or board member of any organization with an interest in this article.
Introducing the Brookings and Ashoka Collaborative Innovation Challenge: Valuing Homes in Black Communities
The time has always been right to address discrimination in housing. But since the release of the 2018 Brookings report, The devaluation of assets in Black neighborhoods—which showed homes in Black-majority neighborhoods are priced on average $48,000 less than comparable homes in white-majority neighborhoods—research, social activism, and legislative action have spurred a reckoning. The real estate industry has had to reckon with common practices that extract wealth from families simply for living in Black neighborhoods.
Lower home prices in Black neighborhoods reflect how much we value their residents. The problem of housing devaluation requires input from a wide range of actors across multiple sectors, including the people closest to the problem; but they have less resources and power to engage with powerful people who influence policy. Consequently, we must financially incentivize and empower local leaders, firms, and nonprofits to work alongside well-resourced institutions to find a new generation of solutions.
To empower local stakeholders and combat housing devaluation, the Brookings Institution is joining forces with the social entrepreneurship organization Ashoka to provide opportunities and financial incentives of up to $100,000 for people who are proximate to the problem so that additional seats can be pulled up to the decisionmaking table. This collaborative challenge, Valuing Homes in Black Communities, begins this week.
What do we mean by devaluation?
After carefully attending to social conditions like education, crime and walkability, our research found that homes in Black-majority neighborhoods across the country are priced, on average, approximately 23% or $48,000 less than similar homes in similar social conditions in mostly white areas, where the share of the Black population are less than a percent. In some specific metropolitan areas, the price difference is even more pronounced. For instance, in the Lynchburg, Va. metropolitan area, we see an -81% difference between average home prices in Black-majority and white neighborhoods. In the Rochester, N.Y. metro area, there is a -65% difference. In the metro area with the largest Black population, Detroit, Mich., there is a -37% disparity.
For the millions of residents who live in Black-majority neighborhoods, this devaluation means less money for critical municipal services like public schools and policing. Less equity in a home translates into less cash for ever-increasing college tuition, thus leading to more student loan debt. And lower value on our homes also means less capital to start a business. Our research finds that the $156 billion in lost revenue could have started 4.4 million businesses, based on the average amount of capital Black people use to start their firms.
Since the release of this report, there have been congressional hearings, additional studies and news reports corroborating our conclusion that racial bias significantly influences home values. The Biden Administration has acknowledged Brookings’s devaluation research in various memoranda, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently announced an interagency task force on appraisals. This came right before the government-sponsored enterprise Freddie Mac released a study showing systemic racial bias among appraisers. The acknowledgement of this issue by the highest levels of government is appreciated and encouraging. But we believe that solutions must come from people who experience and combat discrimination on the daily basis.
Correcting home values must go beyond appraisal regulation
After our devaluation report was released, people’s attention immediately shifted to the appraisal industry. Appraisers are the professionals who explicitly assess value. So, it is understandable why the industry garnered scrutiny. In 2019, one of this blog’s authors testified in Congress along with representatives from the Appraisal Institute and the Appraisal Foundation, two organizations that help certify and regulate appraisal professionals. When Rep. Al Green of Texas asked the panel to raise our hand if we believe “discrimination plays a role in the devaluation of property in neighborhoods that are predominated with minorities,” I was the only one who raised a hand.
If you have a structural innovation that fully values homes in Black communities, please join the Ashoka-Brookings collaborative challenge to win up to $100,000 to help solve for housing devaluation.
Since then, numerous news stories have surfaced that show the intrinsic value of whiteness expressed in biased appraisals. In 2020, the New York Times reported on the Jacksonville, Fla. couple, Abena (who is Black) and Alex (who is white) Horton, who had their home appraised. They believed that the appraisal was too low. So, they got a second appraisal. However, during this second round, the couple staged the appraisal appointment so that Alex was present instead of Abena, while the couple had purposefully removed all signs of Abena and their biracial son. The second appraisal yielded a 40% higher value than the first appraisal.
In 2020 in Indianapolis, amid the pandemic, Carlette Duffy sensed that appraisals on her home in the Black-majority Flanner House Homes neighborhood, west of downtown Indianapolis, had come in too low. After removing pictures, books and clothing—or scrubbing the Blackness from her home—and getting a white stand-in, her appraisal came in $134,000 higher. Numerous other stories have been published in places throughout the nation showing racial bias in appraisals.
While appraisals are certainly involved in lower home values, they are not the only actors influencing price. Lenders, real estate agent behavior, elected officials and public policies, biased labor markets as well other predatory housing practices also contribute to the problem of devaluation. Consequently, we need a suite of innovations based on people who are intimate with the issue.
The Ashoka-Brookings Challenge
We believe that no one understands the issue of housing devaluation better than the advocacy groups, firms and institutions who have been working to remove the everyday policies and practices that extract wealth and opportunity from residents, throttling their growth. We also believe that devaluation reflects discrimination throughout housing markets. Consequently, we are interested in innovations that address low appraisals, mortgage rates and insurance costs.
In addition, the country needs structural innovations that enable development without displacement; make it possible for people of all incomes to live and work in the same place; and push back against the increasing prevalence of financial landlords and the widespread use of eviction proceedings that accompany it.
If you have a structural innovation that fully values homes in Black communities and/or are connected to a community of innovators, please join the Ashoka-Brookings collaborative challenge to solve for housing devaluation. Participate in the opportunity to win funding of up to $100,000 to help drive change forward.
Participants can submit applications from now until January 13th on the Valuing Homes in Black Communities competition website. We are looking for applications from innovators who are advancing policy-based and market-based change on the local, regional and/or national scale. Participants will have a chance to win funding of up to $100,000. Participants who submit their application by December 2nd may also qualify for additional funding of up to $15,000 along with guaranteed advancement to the semifinalist round.
Past and present exclusionary policies and practices like redlining, racial housing covenants, single family zoning ordinances, and neighborhood level price-comparison approaches to valuation impact today’s home values. Correcting housing markets will require initiatives that encourage inclusion rather than exclusion and seek restoration of the value extracted by racism. The Ashoka-Brookings Collaborative Innovation Challenge on devaluation does just that.
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Where is the Fed Vice Chair for Supervision?
Randal Quarles, the first Trump appointment to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, finished his four-year term as the Vice Chair for Supervision on October 13, 2021. To replace him, President Biden has nominated no one. The Fed replaced him with no one. For now, the Fed’s vital supervisory and regulatory priorities will be managed by the Fed’s Board of Governors, through their committee structure.
There is much to lament with this state of affairs. Quarles was the first to hold the position: it was created in 2010 in the Dodd-Frank Act to encourage the Fed to focus more completely on the vital work of bank regulation and supervision, areas that many feared had become neglected during the Greenspan years. Even though the position was created under a signature law of the Obama administration, that administration did not prioritize the formal appointment, relying instead on Fed Governor Tarullo to manage the portfolio, just as former Fed Governors had done. Today, for reasons known only to the administration itself, if known at all, the Biden administration has been plagued by delays in filling Fed and other financial regulatory vacancies. Even though the Vice Chair’s term is fixed by statute at four years, we still have no insight into the people the administration is even considering to succeed Quarles, as the administration has not even announced an intent to nominate anyone to any position at the Fed.
Quarles, a Republican, pursued a bank regulatory and supervisory agenda with expertise and a clear vision. He is no favorite of some Democrats, who do not endorse his vision, have little use for his expertise, and have been eager to see him depart the scene. Whether the Democrats would prefer it otherwise or not, Quarles is not going anywhere for now. He remains a Fed Governor, with the same important responsibilities over regulatory, supervisory, and monetary policy as his colleagues on the Board. That term is fixed for fourteen years and will not expire until 2032.
Here is the good news. Despite the mishandling of these vacancies from the Biden administration, the Fed’s decision not to reassign these priorities to another Governor is exactly the right thing to do. Its other alternatives are not attractive. It could have given now-Governor Quarles the responsibilities despite the expired term, but his ability to operate without the benefit of his statutory status would be significantly curtailed. The other option is hardly better: the Fed could have given these responsibilities to a candidate more in line with Democratic priorities—Fed Governor Lael Brainard, an expert on virtually every regulatory and supervisory question before the Fed, would fit this bill nicely. But Governor Brainard herself is a candidate to succeed Fed Chair Jay Powell, whose term as Chairman expires in January, and any move to reassign her portfolio could look like meddling in the Fed Chair sweepstakes that is still ongoing.
And so, the Vice Chair for Supervision—that unique creature of governance created by Congress just a decade ago—remains vacant, creating the possibility that financial regulation and supervision will not take their place at the forefront of the Fed’s policymaking. What’s more, the replacement of the Vice Chair position with a committee will devolve more authority to the Fed’s staff to handle this highly political and politicized portfolio.
So why is this good news? Because public oversight of the Federal Reserve System is primarily a product of public governance. We need, as a public, to have rigorous debates about who we want our central bankers to be. One such debate is underway as the Biden administration continues to consider the president’s appointment of the Fed Chair. Those who support Jay Powell, the incumbent, praise his leadership during the 2020 pandemic crisis and his management of a major shift in monetary policy regime. His detractors argue that his regulatory priorities are insufficiently aligned with those of the president, especially around bank regulation, financial stability, and climate change. While the tone of this debate can veer toward hyperbole—an American political tradition as old as the Republic—this is what politics looks like. We should welcome it.
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What we are not having, however, is that same level of debate around the priorities that the Fed should pursue as a regulator and supervisor. For this debate, we need to have time to consider viable candidates for this position. And we need the Fed not to do this work for us by pretending that the work of bank regulation and supervision has no political content in it.
The position obviously does have political content. The act of regulating and supervising the financial system is almost top to bottom a political exercise. We have elections to let that content and those exercises dictate the course that regulation and supervision should take. Just because the Biden administration has inexplicably dodged its responsibility for sponsoring that debate does not mean that the Fed should skip the debate entirely. By failing to appoint a successor to Quarles, the Fed has turned up the heat on the politicians to give us—the people and institutions affected most by the Fed’s regulatory and supervisory work—the chance to perform our role in vetting the nominees for this job.
Let’s hope the president accepts the Fed’s invitation as quickly as possible.
The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment. A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.
Policymakers must enable consumer data rights and protections in financial services
After years of inactivity, momentum is gathering for policy action on issues related to consumer financial data in the United States. In July, the president issued an executive order encouraging the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to enable data portability in financial services. The CFPB issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking last year and expects to commence a rulemaking process in spring 2022. Congress has shown interest in the subject as well, most recently by holding a Task Force on Financial Technology hearing on consumers’ right to access financial data.
Such momentum is long overdue. Data portability in financial services has the potential to help consumers in their choice of financial service provider and enable innovation by new entrants seeking to offer a better deal or a novel product or service. While data portability is necessary to realize a more competitive and innovative financial services sector, other consumer data rights and protections are also needed. Our research indicates that consumers are demanding greater control than the current legal and regulatory framework governing financial data provides. To be responsive to these important interests, both regulatory and legislative action is needed to ensure that consumers have appropriate data rights and protections.
Background
In the wake of the global financial crisis and the ensuing public outrage over the behavior of “too big to fail” banks, policymakers in the early 2010s found themselves looking for ways to promote competition in financial services. While many debated the merits of breaking up large banks or a new Glass-Steagall Act to separate retail and investment banking, others looked for ways to promote competition from the ground up. Around the world, policymakers began to contemplate data portability measures as a way to loosen banks’ hold on dissatisfied customers.1
In the United States, this responsibility fell to the CFPB. Under Section 1033 of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, the CFPB was empowered to prescribe rules to enable data portability in financial services.2 However, with numerous other priorities on the CFPB’s to-do list, rulemaking on Section 1033 never took place. Instead, the CFPB issued non-binding principles for data sharing and closely monitored developments in the market.
Meanwhile, consumer demand for data portability accelerated, driven by the burgeoning fintech revolution. To meet this demand, “data aggregation” companies such as Plaid began to connect consumers’ favorite fintech apps to their bank accounts. Data aggregators often used online banking login credentials shared by consumers to gain entry to consumer accounts and “screen-scrape” data available to consumers via online banking portals. Though this practice is still in use, aggregators have more recently begun to enter into contracts with banks, credit unions, core technology providers, and others to lessen dependence on credential-sharing and screen-scraping in favor of the use of tokenized account access and application program interfaces (APIs).
The financial data sharing ecosystem largely built on this technological framework has given rise to a vibrant fintech market, including many innovative companies who use consumer financial data to design products and services that help consumers improve their financial health. Today, fintechs offer products that use consumers’ financial data to help them avoid costly overdraft fees when their balances dwindle, build emergency savings when their balances grow, and optimize their bill payments to ensure that bills are paid on time without creating a liquidity shortfall. Other fintechs use cashflow data for underwriting purposes, a practice that shows evidence of increasing access to credit among those without a credit history or a credit score and those whose credit scores understate their creditworthiness.3 Still other fintechs use financial data to enable their customers to send money to friends and family within and between countries. These services are widely used, and their popularity has only increased as more and more banking activity moved online during the COVID-19 crisis.
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In early 2021, the Financial Health Network conducted a nationally representative survey to explore consumers’ interactions with, and attitudes towards, the financial data ecosystem. According to our research, more than two thirds of banked consumers are fintech users, having linked financial apps to their checking account. In contrast with banks and credit unions,4 young people and people of color are particularly likely to use fintech apps, with apps used to send money to friends and family being the most common type of fintech app and the type of fintech app used most frequently.
The need for data portability
The lack of a comprehensive legal framework designed to govern the rights and duties of the various players in this ecosystem creates risks for individual consumers, financial institutions, and the functioning of the financial data ecosystem as a whole. Last year, the Financial Health Network partnered with FinRegLab, Flourish Ventures, and the Mitchell Sandler law firm to produce a comprehensive analysis of the legal and regulatory landscape governing consumer financial data. This analysis uncovered numerous open interpretive and policy questions related to Section 1033 as well as older statutes covering a set of interlocking issues including privacy and security under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, accuracy and privacy under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, fairness under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and liability under the Electronic Funds Transfer Act.
Unless regulators take action, these open questions will continue to fester and have the potential to impede data portability. Already there are reports of some financial institutions restricting access to consumer data.5 Such restrictions can serve to entrench incumbent institutions and limit competition to the detriment of consumers. These restrictions also are out of step with consumer preferences. According to our research, 62 percent of consumers are in favor of data portability, believing that their bank or credit union should be required to share their personal data with another company (such as a fintech provider) if the consumer directs it to do so.
Importantly, this majority holds across demographic groups, including age, gender, education, race/ethnicity, and household income. Support for data portability in financial services is also bipartisan, with majorities of self-identified Democrats, Republicans, and Independents in favor of it.
Support for data portability holds regardless of the type of institution that serves as a consumer’s primary bank or credit union. This underscores the importance of ensuring that customers of small financial institutions with more limited technological resources have access to secure, affordable solutions to enable data portability.
These results confirm a broad consensus in favor of data portability that has been increasingly apparent for some time. Indeed, at the CFPB’s Symposium on Consumer Access to Financial Records in early 2020, few participants disputed that data portability is a right that should be available to consumers and that rulemaking on Section 1033 should guarantee.6 What they did not agree on was what other rights and protections should be guaranteed and how best to do so.
The data minimization principle
Among the issues dividing large banks, small banks, fintechs, data aggregators, and other market participants at the CFPB’s 2020 Symposium was the question of the scope. What kind of data fields should be able to be shared under Section 1033, and who should decide what kind of data are appropriate for what use case?
In the absence of regulatory guidance, the scope of data available to be shared at a consumer’s direction today varies greatly depending on where a consumer banks. Practically, this means that while some consumers currently enjoy a high degree of data portability, others have a much more limited ability to consistently share their data. As a result, consumers are unlikely to understand the scope of the data they share unless they carefully read complex legal disclosures.
The Financial Health Network asked fintech app users who had connected their fintech app to their checking account how much of their checking account data their fintech app is capable of accessing. 41 percent reported believing it could only access the data it needed, 25 percent reported believing it could access all of their checking account data, and the remaining third of respondents reported that they did not know.
When asked about how much of their checking account data fintech apps should be able to access, 87 percent reported believing that their fintech app should only be able to access the data it needs. Only 11 percent reported believing it should be able to access all the data in their checking account. In other words, consumers know what rules they want, but they are not sure if the current system is aligned with their preferences.
As with data portability, this preference for data minimization holds across demographic groups, including age, gender, education, race/ethnicity, household income, and political party affiliation. Unlike data portability, the preference for data minimization is overwhelming, with support usually in the high 80s to low 90s, with at least 75 percent of each demographic group in favor.
This indicates that while consumers desire the right to data portability, they have a strong preference for discretion as they share their data and do not wish to share any data beyond what is required for a given use case. Some data holding financial institutions (such as banks) have also emphasized this data minimization principle. However, those entities have their own competitive incentives to limit data flows and would not be impartial arbiters of what data are needed for a given use case.
With this market dynamic in mind, the CFPB should use its authority under Section 1033 to determine what data must be accessible, how often they must be made available, how long those data can be accessed for, and to whom they may be made available. If the CFPB does not feel it has the authority to impose data minimization limitations on data aggregators and recipients without impeding data portability, further legislative action may be needed to empower the Bureau to ensure that those entities are only accessing the data they need for a given use case, and are only storing that data for the minimum amount of time necessary. Congress will find strong support for this principle across the political and socio-economic spectrums.
Protecting consumers’ privacy
Consumers’ preference for discretion is not limited to the data they choose to share with fintech apps. Indeed, our research indicates that consumers are equally sensitive to financial or personal data about them being shared without their affirmative consent, no matter what institution is doing the sharing. Just as consumers do not want big tech companies sharing data about their browsing patterns without consent, consumers likewise do not want their bank or fintech app sharing financial data about them without their consent. Our survey shows consumers seem to view these forms of data sharing in much the same way, despite other research indicating that consumers have differing levels of trust for these institutions more broadly.7
Almost 90 percent of consumers (consistent among all demographic groups) expressed a preference for data sharing by their primary bank or credit union to be bound by an opt-in standard rather than an opt-out standard.
This strong preference for an opt-in standard stands in sharp contrast with current legal requirements which cannot be changed without legislative action. At present, consumers who do not want their data to be shared must opt-out, and even their ability to do that is limited. Banks are still permitted under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to share consumer data with non-affiliated third parties if the information sharing is subject to one of the numerous exceptions under the law, regardless of whether a consumer might prefer them not to share.8 In other words, the current law places the burden of protecting privacy on consumers, who are expected to carefully parse complex legal disclosures provided by their financial institution and affirmatively opt-out of any optional data sharing. According to our research, only about 1 in 4 consumers reports having done this. As low as that is, it may under-state how rare it is for consumers to opt-out of data sharing. The plurality of banks interviewed in a 2020 study by the Government Accountability Office reported opt-out rates less than 5 percent.
In order to ensure that privacy protections are reflective of consumers’ preferences, we believe that legislative change is needed. The United States is past due for comprehensive data privacy legislation that not only addresses open issues in financial services but also ensures that consumers are afforded strong and consistent data rights and protections when they interact with tech platforms, healthcare providers, educational institutions, and others. However, if such a comprehensive effort remains beyond the reach of Congress, lawmakers should nevertheless build on the bipartisan consensus among consumers and past interest from both Republicans and Democrats in updating consumers’ data rights and protections in financial services. At the very least, data sharing by financial institutions should be bound by an opt-in standard.
Conclusion
As the financial data ecosystem evolves, regulatory and legislative action to ensure that consumers have strong data rights and protections is increasingly urgent. With momentum for action building and consumers having an unusual level of agreement on the need for data portability, data minimization, and data privacy, policymakers should proceed with the clear goal of ensuring that consumers are the primary beneficiary of the use of their financial data.
Stability and inclusivity of stablecoins: A conversation with Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire
While cryptocurrency has been around for over a decade, it has only gained mainstream popularity recently. Crypto backers see the technology as the way of the future, but its instability leaves others skeptical. As a less volatile alternative to traditional cryptocurrencies, asset-backed stablecoins have joined the market. But as with all new technology, important questions must be resolved before stablecoins could become a more widely accepted part of our financial system.
In this fireside chat with Circle co-founder, chairman, and CEO Jeremy Allaire, we will discuss the rise of stablecoins, the state of regulation of stablecoins, and the potential for greater inclusion through new financial technology (fintech). The dialogue will cut through much of the hype of cryptocurrency – stablecoins in particular – and dive into the two important and distinct issues surrounding stablecoins: financial stability and inclusion.
This event will be part of the Brookings Center on Regulation and Markets’ Series on Financial Markets and Regulation, which looks at financial institutions and markets broadly and explores how regulatory policy affects consumers, businesses, investors, fintech, financial stability, and economic growth.
Viewers can submit questions for speakers by emailing events@brookings.edu or via Twitter using #Stablecoin.
The US needs urgently to raise its macropru game
Donald Kohn
Robert V. Roosa Chair in International Economics
Senior Fellow – Economic Studies
Implementing robust macroprudential policy—addressing threats to financial stability beyond those that were the focus of safety and soundness on an institution-by-institution basis or of investor protection market-by-market—was a constructive outcome of the legislative and policy response to the global financial crisis of 2008-09.
In the U.S., the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 strengthened the hand of the Federal Reserve as it addressed the systemic risks in banks and bank holding companies, including those emanating from institutions that were “too big” or “too systemic” to fail. It also created two new institutions to look across the fragmented regulatory landscape to drive macroprudential policy addressing risks outside of banks: the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), which is chaired by the secretary of the Treasury and includes the heads of federal regulatory bodies, is charged with identifying and responding to risks to the financial stability of the United States, and the Office of Financial Research (OFR), which was created to support the work of FSOC through research and data gathering. FSOC’s powers are limited—it can designate systemically important institutions, and it can make recommendations to constituent regulators—but even those authorities have been infrequently used. The structures set up by Dodd-Frank have not led to consistent and effective macroprudential policies in the U.S.
The Biden administration, under the leadership of Janet Yellen at Treasury, intends to drive more active macropru policies, but at this still early stage of the administration, results are not yet evident. It is urgent they get on with the job. First, the “dash for cash” of March 2020 as the pandemic shutdown set in revealed a number of weaknesses in market-driven financial intermediation that required unprecedented and massive central bank intervention to prevent a total breakdown of the financial system that would have made an already dire economic situation much worse. We had hints of those weaknesses before the pandemic, but they became considerably more visible under stress. Moreover, the actions of the Federal Reserve and other central banks to counter their effects raise the possibility that private risk taking will be distorted by the expectation of future interventions in stress situations. The authorities need to move while memories are fresh and political support for corrective steps is at its highest.
The second reason for urgency is the current economic and financial situation. If the economic and financial situation evolves as seems to be expected in financial markets, credit will flow, and financial markets will continue to serve the needs of the economy. But the current situation is replete with fat tails—unusually large risks of the unexpected which, if they come to pass, could result in the financial system amplifying shocks, putting the economy at risk. At a recent FOMC meeting, the Board of Governors staff characterized financial vulnerabilities as “notable,” reflecting some asset valuations, leverage in corners of the financial system, and persistent structural issues.[1] Moreover, these vulnerabilities have arisen in the context of truly unprecedented circumstances, making it difficult, if not impossible, for policymakers or market participants to predict the future with confidence. There’s the virus, of course, and the public and private response to its evolution. In addition, fiscal policies are raising Federal debt-to-income to record peacetime levels and a new monetary policy framework has yet to play out in practice. Meanwhile, inflation has spiked to the highest levels in many years. Yet market participants appear to have priced in very low interest rates for a very long time even as the economy recovers and, judging from risk spreads and equity prices, are quite confident that higher debt levels can be serviced and sustained—even though a disproportionate increase in private debt has been among lower-rated business borrowers.[2]
Well-functioning U.S. financial markets are essential for well-functioning global finance. We saw all too clearly in 2008 how disruptions in U.S. markets can trigger a global financial meltdown and recession. Building resilience in the U.S. to risks that could readily materialize is essential to building confidence in a sustained global recovery from the pandemic. New legislation would be helpful in a number of dimensions—especially in reworking how FSOC and OFR function and making sure they are supported by a more prominent financial stability focus and analytical capability in constituent agencies. But U.S. agencies already have the tools to address many of the vulnerabilities that have lingered since the GFC and became so evident in March of 2020, and some new ones that have emerged more recently.[3]
Here’s a checklist of actions that do not require legislation. Notably, it is not a menu from which to pick a few “dishes” to make a macropru meal—all of these things should be addressed, and promptly.
Banking
The resilience of the banking sector was greatly strengthened after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) by tightened and reformed capital requirements, stress tests of capital adequacy, liquidity requirements, and greater scrutiny of bank risk-management practices, with extra requirements in each area for systemically important banks whose failure would have significant knock-on effects. But more can be done to build resilience in banks and in securities markets where banks intersect with nonbank finance.
A very serious amplifier of stress in the March 2020 dash for cash was the counterintuitive and counterproductive behavior of Treasury securities prices, which fell, rather than rose, in the midst of a flight to liquidity and safety. Dysfunction in the Treasury market spills over in many ways to the broader financial markets and the economy since Treasuries are relied on for liquidity by market participants, for risk management, and as a pricing reference point. There were a number of contributors to this behavior, but one was the reluctance of private dealers, the largest of which are subsidiaries of systemically important bank holding companies, to flex their balance sheets to pick up the Treasury securities being offered in the market. The dealers were especially constrained by the risk-insensitive leverage ratio applied to systemically important bank holding companies, until the Federal Reserve temporarily exempted deposits at the Fed and Treasuries from its calculation. That exemption has lapsed, and with continuing Fed securities purchases, deposits at the Fed are a growing threat to making the leverage ratio salient again, which would constrain dealer market-making appetite. The Federal Reserve should permanently exempt deposits at the Fed from calculation of the leverage ratio.
This exemption, however, should not be allowed to reduce the capital required of banks, especially systemically important banks. There are a number of ways to keep this from happening, but one I favor is to raise risk-based requirements a bit on average through the cycle by activating the countercyclical capital buffer (CCyB). The Fed’s current practice is to leave this at zero unless it has identified the risk environment as already elevated. In this, it differs from many other authorities globally, who have targeted a positive CCyB in a normal risk environment, which enabled them to release that capital to back lending when the Covid-related shut down hit.
The argument for an active CCyB has been strengthened by experience in the pandemic. Evidence from both the U.S. and EU is that banks are reluctant to dip into their regulatory capital buffers to make loans under stress out of concern about market reactions and about supervisory constraints on earnings distributions. Studies have shown that banks with less headroom over buffers tended to lend less in the pandemic than banks with more headroom.[4] The beauty of the CCyB is that once released, it is not part of a regulatory capital buffer and is more available for use. Moreover, the recent changes to the Fed’s stress tests and capital requirements, including substituting a “stress capital buffer” derived from stress test results for elements of the capital stack, are likely to make capital requirements procyclical; adding an actively managed CCyB would counter this adverse macroprudential outcome.
The evident reluctance of banks to dip into regulatory buffers under stress suggests a reasonably sizable CCyB in “normal times” to release under stress would be a helpful countercyclical measure from a macroprudential perspective. The Financial Policy Committee at the Bank of England has established two percent as its target CCyB in a standard risk environment, twice what many other macropru authorities have set, in part by shifting capital from other elements of the stack.
The Federal Reserve should make the CCyB positive in normal risk environments and then manage it actively as risks build or materialize. As it implements a CCyB, the Fed should consider the appropriate level in the context of sterilizing a potential release of capital from adjusting the leverage ratio and the composition of the overall capital stack that would best support the resilience of the financial system and the economy.
Market-based finance
Credit has increasingly shifted to nonbank channels, especially to markets, responding to innovation and to regulatory arbitrage as bank regulation tightened. But elements in nonbank finance share the leverage and maturity and liquidity transformation characteristics of banks, making them also vulnerable to runs and fire sales that tighten credit and amplify business cycles. In many respects, however, vulnerabilities in market-based finance are harder to deal with than they are with banks. They are spread over many types of institutions and markets, subject to multiple regulators—and some parts are very lightly regulated, if at all. Market-based finance is global, facilitating arbitrage across borders and necessitating a globally agreed approach to regulation. And rapid technological change produces a constantly evolving set of instruments and players. Still, tools are available to address a number of vulnerabilities and the centrality of U.S. markets to global markets means that the U.S. should lead the effort.
As noted, well-functioning U.S. treasury markets are a critical element in keeping both bank and nonbank financing channels operating well. Leverage ratio reform is a necessary but not sufficient condition to bolstering Treasury market liquidity. In addition, the Treasury and the Fed should examine the costs and benefits of mandating central clearing for Treasuries and repos, which might free up dealer capital that would be available to be used for market making.[5] And the agencies need to gather and publish more complete data on market transactions to help both regulators and market participants better understand and anticipate market dynamics.[6]
Even with greater private-sector market making, circumstances could arise in which the Federal Reserve would need to step in to preserve well-functioning Treasury securities markets. To that end, backstop standing repo facilities for foreign official holders of Treasuries and for a wide variety of private market participants would put structures in place that could fill that role in a well-anticipated and transparent fashion. In that regard, the Federal Reserve’s recent announcement of two such facilities—one for foreign official institutions and another for dealers—was welcome.
But the repo facility for private parties is limited to the primary dealers and, over time, some depository institutions. To better guarantee Treasury market functioning, the Federal Reserve needs to design a repo facility that is available to a variety of large participants, like hedge funds and other leveraged investors that are playing an increasingly important role in the market. Such an extension would raise issues of counterparty risk and distortions to risk-taking incentives among lightly regulated entities; those can be dealt with through varying haircuts and by imposing a small ex ante fee on lightly regulated entities with access to the facility, but other approaches may also work.
Several types of open-end funds faced very large redemptions in March, including both money market funds and corporate bond and loan funds; to meet those demands, funds turned in part to selling the Treasuries they held for liquidity purposes, so these redemptions disrupted Treasury, corporate bond, and commercial paper markets. The scale of the redemptions is not surprising. Many mutual funds offer their investors much greater liquidity—an ability to redeem by tomorrow at tonight’s closing price—than the liquidity of the underlying securities they hold, which often trade in illiquid markets or simply don’t trade at all, like commercial paper. This mismatch creates a first mover advantage—an incentive to get out while the fund has Treasuries to sell—before redemptions by other investors force fire sales of less liquid assets, depressing prices. The SEC must change regulations to align the liquidity offered investors with the liquidity of the underlying assets in the fund. There are a variety of ways to do this—and the choice for money market funds might differ from the best choice for bond funds. Swing pricing forces early redeemers to pay the price of the liquidity they are getting; where that isn’t possible, as is argued for money market funds, alternatives may work to properly price liquidity under stress, like penalizing redemptions under some circumstances or holding back a portion of the investment.
Another source of elevated demand for liquidity in March 2020 arose from initial margining at central counterparties in derivative and securities markets. According to users, a lack of transparency and predictability about margining methodologies contributed to unexpected demands for cash during the “dash for cash.” But in addition, margin requirements rose substantially as markets became much more volatile. From the perspective of the clearinghouses, this made good sense, and in fact central counterparties remained functioning and viable during an extremely stressful market episode. But here is a case of the micro and macroprudential impulses in conflict as the interest of each clearinghouse added to overall market stress. The CFTC and the SEC should draw on the systemic perspectives of the Fed and Treasury to make margins in CCPs less procyclical with more through-the-cycle methodologies.
This is a formidable list—and I could have added more. Much of it is already under consideration in the U.S. and in global groups, like the FSB. Each element will draw opposition from private parties fearing added costs and counting on intervention from the fiscal and monetary authorities to contain the next market crisis. All of it will require a careful balancing of costs and benefits—but most explicitly and importantly taking account of the costs to society, beyond the costs to market participants, of repeated episodes of financial instability.
Other jurisdictions
The risk environment in the financial markets of many other advanced economies is quite similar to that facing the U.S. Asset prices are elevated and leverage in some sectors has ballooned as market participants count on low interest rates persisting for a very long time. But uncertainties abound as the global economy emerges from a global pandemic after application of unprecedented monetary and fiscal policies. And, until the U.S. raises its macropru game, they are vulnerable to disruptions emanating from U.S. markets.
Many authorities outside the U.S. have utilized a wider array of macropru tools than has the U.S. Given the risk environment, now is the time to make sure domestic institutions and markets would be resilient to severe shocks. Where requirements were adjusted or eased in response to the onset of the pandemic, they should be restored to former settings now that economies are recovering and credit is flowing readily. For example, CCyBs cut in March 2020 to encourage bank lending should be raised as quickly as is consistent with the commitments and forward guidance given when the reductions were announced. Where the “dash for cash” revealed new vulnerabilities that can be addressed in individual jurisdictions, actions should be taken to build resilience—for example, if the margining at CCPs and the behavior of highly leveraged investors in domestic sovereign bond markets amplified stress. Where effective remediation is not possible in global markets without the participation of the U.S., other authorities should work closely with U.S. authorities in international fora to build consensus around best practices that can be implemented globally, including in the United States.
[1] Darrell Duffie highlighted the potential for central clearing to economize on dealer capital. https://www.brookings.edu/research/still-the-worlds-safe-haven/
[2] Notably, the recommendations of the G-30 group on Treasury market functioning are broadly aligned with those of the Task Force. https://group30.org/publications/detail/4950
[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/un-used-bank-capital-buffers-credit-supply-shocks-at-SMEs-during-the-pandemic.htm. And for similar findings away from the U.S.: https://www.bis.org/bcbs/publ/d521.pdf.
[4] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/monetary20210818a.htm
[5] https://www.ft.com/content/32a57864-d983-46b0-bbfa-85fd2d2361e5
[6] Much (though not all) of what follows is based on the recommendations of a Chicago Booth-Brookings Task Force on Financial Stability that I co-chaired. https://www.brookings.edu/research/report-of-the-task-force-on-financial-stability/. I have also drawn on my talk to the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole symposium. https://www.brookings.edu/research/building-a-more-stable-financial-system-unfinished-business/
The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment. A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.
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Regulating stablecoins isn’t just about avoiding systemic risk
It’s good news that financial regulators are focused on figuring out what to do about stablecoins because their growth is creating significant risks. But there’s a bigger picture here than how to bring these new instruments within the regulatory perimeter, or how to regulate crypto generally, even though these are important. The bigger issue is how do we modernize our payments system? This should be a Biden administration priority because it would help low-income people in particular.
Timothy G. Massad
Senior Fellow – The John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Former Chairman – Commodity Futures Trading Commission
Former Assistant Secretary – Treasury for Financial Stability
The connection between stablecoins and helping low-income people might seem unlikely because stablecoins are primarily used today to speculate on cryptocurrencies. While their growth has led financial regulators to worry about potential systemic risks, that growth is partly because of deficiencies in our payments system, and those deficiencies are a major reason why the U.S. lags behind other developed nations in financial inclusion. Stablecoins have potentially much broader application. Properly regulated, they are one means—although clearly not the only means—of curing some of those payment system deficiencies. Thus, financial regulators should not only address the risks that stablecoins pose but keep their aim on that broader goal of modernizing our payments system and improving access to the financial system.
This paper discusses (1) why stablecoins are a problem; (2) how we should regulate stablecoins; and (3) the bigger picture about modernizing payments and improving financial access.
The risks of stablecoins
Stablecoins are digital tokens whose value is pegged to the dollar (or another currency or asset). They serve to grease the wheels of the crypto industry, enabling investors to easily transfer value between different crypto exchanges and cryptocurrencies without converting back and forth into dollars. Settlement is instant, thus avoiding delays of other means of payment. This function coupled with explosive growth in the crypto currency market explains why the market capitalization of stablecoins has increased from $20 billion twelve months ago to over $120 billion today1.
Figure 1: Market capitalization of stablecoins, January 2017 to August 2021
Stablecoins are currently not regulated in any meaningful way. While some issuers have state licenses, these impose minimal requirements. There are no standards requiring issuers to protect reserves or maintain liquidity. I have written about how a sudden spike in demand for repayment could cause a stablecoin to “break the buck” the same way the Reserve Primary Fund did in September of 2008, which triggered a run on money market mutual funds that was only stopped when the Treasury issued a guarantee of money market mutual fund liabilities.
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Although stablecoins are currently not used widely outside of the crypto industry, they have the potential for much broader application. Stablecoins first garnered wide attention in June 2019 when Facebook proposed creating “a simple global currency”2 or stablecoin called Libra that would be pegged to a basket of fiat currencies including the dollar and the euro. That proposal provoked harsh criticism, both because of its sponsor3 as well as its design. Central bankers feared it would undermine sovereign currencies and monetary policies4. The proposal has since been renamed Diem and redesigned as a set of stablecoins, each tied to an individual fiat currency. It is not operational, in part, because Facebook promised in Congressional hearings that it would not launch the idea unless regulators approved, and they have not done so. Other stablecoin issuers did not ask for permission, and their tokens have grown enormously, which has finally prompted regulators to consider acting.
How to regulate stablecoins
In July, Treasury Secretary Yellen convened the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (PWG) to discuss stablecoins. The PWG does not have any power to actually do anything about stablecoins, however. Instead, Treasury staff will soon issue a report that will recommend a path forward, which could include a mix of recommendations for actions by different regulatory agencies and potentially Congress.
The best option is to have the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) commence a review. Under Title VIII of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the FSOC can require regulation of a “payment activity” that it determines “is, or is likely to become, systemically important.”5 The FSOC has broad powers to get information from institutions engaged in an activity that it has reasonable cause to believe meets the standard for such a designation. That type of inquiry is much needed given the lack of transparency about stablecoins.
The law sets forth criteria for making the systemically important designation, which include size as well as the effect that the failure or disruption of the activity would have on critical markets, financial institutions, or the broader financial system. Under Title VIII, the FSOC has designated two operators of business payment systems as systemically important financial market utilities, but it has never designated an activity generally nor an entity engaged primarily in retail payments. The “likely to become” phrase is not in Title I, under which FSOC designated four entities following the global financial crisis. It is clearly relevant to the concern that, unless regulated, stablecoins could continue to grow dramatically.
Having been a member of the FSOC for three years, I believe an FSOC review will be useful even if it decides against a systemically important designation. The FSOC can still be the forum for making a sound choice among the alternative paths, which involve different regulators who comprise the FSOC. There is a good argument that stablecoins could be regulated as bank deposits under existing law. Section 21 of Glass Steagall (which survived despite repeal of much of that law) prohibits anyone from receiving a bank deposit unless subject to regulatory oversight under specific exceptions.
There is also the option of regulating stablecoins as securities or as money market funds. Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler has suggested he might move to do so and has referred to the PWG report as something that his staff is working on with Secretary Yellen. Although I have compared stablecoin risks to those of money market funds, I do not think that is the best way to regulate them. They are fundamentally payment devices and not investments. Classifying them as securities would also appear to pre-empt a systemic importance determination as part of the payment authority given by Dodd Frank since the definition of “payment, settlement and clearing activity” for purposes of FSOC’s jurisdiction excludes “any offer or sale of a security under the Securities Act.” The PWG report will presumably indicate which path of this fork the Biden administration will pursue.
Another option is to recommend to Congress that it enact new authority. Various bills have been introduced to address stablecoins, including one that would limit issuance to entities that are banks. But at a time when the Biden administration and Congress already have many weighty legislative priorities, rapid enactment of legislation seems doubtful.
If the FSOC does reach a determination of systemic importance, the Federal Reserve would be charged with developing “risk management standards” that “promote robust risk management; promote safety and soundness; reduce systemic risks; and support the stability of the broader financial system.”6
The path chosen may affect the comprehensiveness of the regulatory framework that can be created, though we should put in place what we can now and add to it later if necessary. Ideally, we need a framework that includes not just traditional prudential regulation standards, but also operational risk measures, consumer protection standards, and standards to achieve interoperability. Regulators should require that reserves are invested in bank deposits, Treasuries, or other safe, liquid assets, and that there are liquidity requirements. If the Federal Reserve were to broaden who is eligible for a master account, then stablecoin providers which are not banks could park reserves at the Fed, an option some would argue is even safer because it would avoid the operational risk of a particular bank. Regulators should require a capital buffer even if reserves are invested in cash or other safe assets. That is because capital can protect against other types of losses, such as operational ones. Regulators may also want to ban the payment of interest to discourage users from maintaining large deposits. That plus requiring reserves to be invested in cash or other safe assets would likely mean that stablecoins would be attractive only as payment instruments, not as investments. A prohibition on interest would put stablecoins at a disadvantage relative to bank deposits if interest rates rise, but regulators might desire that in these early days of the industry. Compliance with “know your customer,” anti-money laundering, and other laws combatting the financing of terrorism is crucial.
There should also be operational resilience standards. This is a huge area of risk often overlooked in commentary that focuses on stablecoin financial risks. Stablecoins run on decentralized blockchains and smart contracts. The software for the various layers of operation could have flaws or could be vulnerable to attack. The largest stablecoins run on multiple blockchains but are separate and distinct tokens on each such blockchain, as a recent post by Neha Narula of MIT explains. That means risks associated with the integrity and reliability of the blockchains and software are multiplied. In addition, a stablecoin could become too large in relation to the capacity of the blockchain itself. Federal Reserve staff are presumably becoming knowledgeable about these issues through their collaboration with MIT to design a hypothetical central bank digital currency platform.
The regulatory framework should also include requirements for adequate disclosure of information to customers, rights of recourse, and standards on protection of customer information, including on how a customer’s data can be used. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may have a role to play in this regard. Finally, we may want to create standards that ensure interoperability between different stablecoins to avoid a fragmented system.
One other advantage of an FSOC process is that the presence of representatives of state banking and securities regulators on the council may help figure out how state regulation of stablecoins—which exists, but is quite limited—should mesh with federal standards.
Both the PWG and the FSOC are well suited to examining risks generated by financial markets. The PWG was created in response to the 1987 stock market crash; the FSOC was created in response to the 2008 global financial crisis. But whatever path is chosen for going forward, the goal should be not just to regulate risks of this particular innovation but to address deficiencies in the payment system that are a principal reason for the growth of stablecoins.
How regulating stablecoins can advance financial inclusion
While stablecoin usage has largely been in the crypto industry, their impact has already been broader. As Federal Reserve chairman Powell said in discussing Facebook’s Libra proposal, the concept “lit a fire” under central bankers to consider central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Both stablecoins and CBDCs are ways to remedy deficiencies of our payments system and potentially enhance financial inclusion. As financial regulators address the risks of stablecoins, they should articulate that larger goal of modernizing our payments system and increasing access to the financial system.
Banks handle the vast majority of U.S. dollar payments in a safe and well-tested manner. But the system is characterized by relatively high cost, weak competition, and insufficient innovation. Americans pay significantly more than Europeans for payment services, particularly because of high fees paid for credit cards. The system is also slow relative to real-time payments increasingly common in other countries.
Most Americans might say the system is fine. We don’t notice interchange fees paid by merchants because they are rolled into prices, and our credit cards give us free revolving credit, cash back, frequent flyer miles, or other rewards. Nor is anyone who has some savings likely to be inconvenienced if a check takes a couple days to clear.
But the flaws of the system weigh much more heavily on those in lower-income brackets. Those who live paycheck to paycheck are at risk of incurring significant overdraft fees when checks don’t clear quickly. The fact that approximately 70%7 of those who use check cashing services have bank accounts is clear evidence that something is wrong with the payments system. In addition, because people with lower incomes have fewer credit cards—they use more prepaid cards and debit cards, which don’t offer the same benefits—the credit card costs embedded in prices fall disproportionately on them.
It is shocking that with a financial system as sophisticated as ours, 25% of American households are unbanked or “underbanked,” according to the FDIC. The latter term means they have a bank account but use nonbank options like check cashing services or payday lenders, often to avoid even more expensive bank overdraft charges. Moreover, as Aaron Klein has written in an excellent new paper, the key issue is access to digital money, and low-income people are at a distinct disadvantage in that regard.
Stablecoins are one way to speed up payments, as are CBDCs. The original Libra proposal focused on its potential financial inclusion benefits. While some might regard that as window dressing by Facebook, the fact is that slow and expensive payments burden low income people in many ways. Remittances—a $700 billion market of sending money from one country to another—is a prime example, as the average cost exceeds 6%.
A retail CBDC could be a means of providing bank accounts as well.8 Of course, the banking industry is quick to cry out that this would disintermediate the banking system—because deposits would leave commercial banks and move to the Fed—and result in less lending and credit creation. But there are many design choices for CBDCs. One option is to create no frills, minimal retail accounts with deposit limits, which might help the unbanked and underbanked without draining away significant deposits. We could also mandate banks to provide such low or no-cost accounts.
These are not the only solutions, and some will argue that existing private and public sector initiatives are sufficient to modernize the system. The Federal Reserve’s new real-time payments system, FedNow, is due to be operational in 2023 and that will surely help. But it needs to be coupled with regulatory changes that will create more competition, or banks may only offer those services within their “walled gardens”.
The real issue is increasing competition—either from new private sector entrants or effectively from the government through a CBDC. Regulators can’t fix the system’s deficiencies as they move to regulate stablecoins, but they can frame the issue in that context. The big picture is that stablecoins have grown enormously because they offer distinct advantages in speed. Banks have not sufficiently modernized the system nor addressed financial inclusion. Changes in regulation may be needed to permit greater competition and facilitate innovation. The Biden administration should make this a national priority.
The risks of US-EU divergence on corporate sustainability disclosure
Sustainability disclosure is in vogue, with more than 80 percent of major global companies reporting on some aspects of their social and environmental impacts. This is partly driven by growing calls for transparency by civil society organizations and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investors, who are demanding detailed and verified corporate sustainability information. ESG investments—assets that fulfill certain minimum social and environmental criteria—grew by more than 40 percent in 2020 in the U.S., and currently make up one-third of all assets under management. However, the process of classifying financial assets as ESG is unregulated in the U.S. Moreover, the data required to assess if ESG assets have achieved a positive social and environmental impact is often missing, incomplete, unreliable, or unstandardized.
The U.S. and the EU are pursuing different trajectories in regulating ESG investing and sustainability disclosures. The U.S. is following a laissez-faire approach with sustainable investing and disclosure being guided by voluntary, private-sector-led processes, protocols, and guidelines. Compliance is driven by peer pressure and the competitive drive to build an image as a sustainable, accountable business. In the absence of regulatory intervention, institutional investors that manage index funds—in particular BlackRock, Vanguard, and Mainstreet—have stepped in to take state-like roles by putting pressure on corporations to address systematic risks like climate change.
These voluntary mechanisms, however, have been criticized for being inadequate. Corporations are routinely accused of “greenwashing” their sustainability reports by overstating their positive environmental and social impact and downplaying negative ones. In the absence of detailed, verified information, asset managers can fall prey to greenwashing and classify securities of unsustainable companies as ESG assets. This leaves ESG investors with little assurance, legal or otherwise, that their money has been put to the intended use.
The EU priming for a green future
The EU, on the other hand, is following a systematic and centralized approach toward climate transition and sustainability disclosure. Its regulatory regime is underpinned by the European Climate Law that legally endorses the EU’s commitment to meet the Paris agreement. To achieve climate neutrality by 2050, the continental body has introduced a slew of regulatory measures that will accelerate capital allocation toward green investments.
One of these is the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) that was introduced in April 2021. It upgrades the 2014 nonfinancial reporting directive and seeks to improve the coverage and reliability of sustainability reporting. When the law comes into effect in 2023, the CSRD is expected to increase the number of European and Europe-based companies that disclose sustainability information by fourfold, to 49,000 in total.
The CSRD proposal applies the “double materiality” principle, requiring companies to disclose information that is material for the enterprise as well as for its societal stakeholders and/or the environment. For example, it requires companies to disclose the extent to which their activities are compatible with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Importantly, the directive requires companies to seek “limited” assurance by third-party auditors.
The directive is also unique for requiring companies to report their sustainability performance using EU-wide disclosure standards. The European Financial Reporting Advisory Group (EFRAG), a private association with strong links with the European Commission, has been tasked with the difficult job of developing these disclosure standards. EFRAG intends to build on existing, third-party sustainability reporting standards and has initiated a collaboration with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), currently the most widely used reporting standard globally.
Alongside a similar sustainability disclosure law that regulates processes of ESG investing in financial institutions, the CSRD is expected to significantly improve transparency in European capital markets. These measures are also likely to increase the adoption of sustainability goals and targets among European corporations, further widening the existing disclosure gap between EU-based and U.S.-based corporations.
A change of heart at the SEC
Until recently, American regulators have been reluctant to mandate sustainability disclosure. At a recent Brookings webinar, Securities Exchanges Commission (SEC) Commissioner Hester Peirce offered the rationale why ESG rule-making is beyond the mandate of the SEC, reflecting the longstanding view among Republican commissioners at the SEC. Her long list of justifications includes some plausible ones, such as the broad and elastic nature of the ESG concept that would make it ill-suited as a domain of disclosure rule-making. Others were highly slanted, such as the contention that ESG disclosure could drive financial instability by leading to excessive allocation of capital to supposedly green technologies. This is ironic because the lack of ESG disclosure mandate is not slowing down the rapid growth of ESG investments; it is only making the process opaque and ineffective, making stock market volatilities more rather than less likely. In fact, the EU’s key justification for sustainability disclosure is preventing systemic risks that threaten financial stability.
The SEC, which now has a 3-2 Democratic majority and a Biden-appointed chairman, has of late shown keenness to play a more active regulatory role. In May 2020, its Investor Advisory Committee provided recommendations that urged the commission to set up mandatory reporting requirements on ESG issues. In December 2020, an ESG subcommittee issued a preliminary recommendation that called for the adoption of mandatory standards for disclosing material ESG risks. The recommendation, however, called for limited disclosure covering a narrow range of metrics tailored by industry, in a manner similar to the standards of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, while warning against the “highly prescriptive” standards that were purportedly adopted by the EU. In March 2021, the commission solicited public input on climate change disclosures, which revealed strong demand for mandatory sustainability disclosure.
Divergent disclosure laws
The SEC is thus set to adopt mandatory ESG disclosure rules, perhaps as early as October 2021. These rules, however, are likely to depart from the EU’s approach in a number of ways. First, an SEC regulation will target only publicly listed companies; the EU’s CSRD, on the other hand, covers large unlisted firms as well. Second, the SEC will mandate disclosure of a narrow range of outcomes related to climate risk and human capital, while the EU will mandate disclosure of a broader set of sustainability outcomes, including indirect outcomes through the value chain and relevant corporate strategies and processes. Third, given capacity constraints, the SEC will likely adopt less comprehensive, third-party disclosure standards as opposed to developing its own comprehensive standards as the EU intends to do. Facing pressure from Republican lawmakers and interest groups, the SEC’s measures are also likely to be timid, focusing only on protecting (ESG) investors through the narrow lens of financial materiality.
By comparison, the relatively wide coverage of the EU’s new disclosure law (CSRD) will lead to significant improvements in data availability. The use of uniform disclosure standards will also ensure that companies provide more detailed and comprehensive sustainability information. It is, however, less obvious how the directive will improve data quality and reliability. The requirement for limited assurance will reduce the most overt forms of greenwashing but is unlikely to eliminate disclosure of data with dubious quality. For example, such an assurance is unlikely to guarantee that a company used the most recent or robust method for assessing its carbon footprint.
The EU’s law is also unlikely to address the lack of standardization, which is to a degree inherent to ESG metrics. Sustainability disclosure will contain significant company-specific, qualitative data, including retrospective and forward-looking statements that are hard to quantify. The EU’s reporting standards will give managers significant discretion on what to disclose and how, and they impose different requirements for companies that differ by sector and size. More nuanced and detailed sustainability disclosure is more valuable to individual (ESG) investors though, at a macro level, this increases the cost of standardizing, comparing, and verifying the reported data. The search for the “holy grail” of the ideal ESG index will thus continue, hampered by the difficulty to converge on what categories of ESG are universally relevant, how to define their scope, which sets of metrics to use, and how to weigh and aggregate them.
A missed opportunity for coordination?
In both the EU and U.S., the move toward greater corporate transparency will help improve the existing power imbalance between shareholders and stakeholders. The lack of verified disclosure today discourages corporations from reporting unsavory business practices that have devastating societal and environmental impact. Greater transparency, stronger regulatory oversight, and more robust third-party ESG assessment can lead to better public understanding of the positive and negative externalities that corporations create, allowing the market to reward “good” ones and penalize “bad” ones. At the same time, given significant informational asymmetries and inevitable loopholes in principles-based disclosure standards, the tendency of corporations to understate their negative externalities is likely to persist, making greenwashing largely inescapable in the foreseeable future.
These challenges are further exacerbated by the lack of coordination to develop globally acceptable disclosure standards. Conflicting regulatory regimes between the U.S. and EU will harm trade and investment flows across the Atlantic and potentially globally. Frictions are already emerging in the context of the EU’s forthcoming carbon border adjustment mechanism, which will impose tariffs on imports from countries without carbon taxes. In the end, coordination at a global scale is needed to regulate corporate sustainability in a manner that does not sand the wheels of the global trading system.
Can fintech improve health?
Abstract
Access to electronic financial services, in particular digital money, has replaced the digital divide as an unintended yet significant barrier for low-income individuals to participate in new technologies, including those that lead to better health outcomes. This paper explores this problem in depth. It begins by describing and documenting the barriers, costs, and benefits to accessing and using digital money. Next, the paper turns to implications of the broader technological revolution on the nature of money and payment systems. This includes an examination into the structure of our banking and payment systems and their overlay into different demographic groups of Americans. The paper then explores the ramifications of disparity in access to digital money for physical health including an analysis of how the COVID-19 pandemic amplified existing problems. It concludes with a set of recommendations to ameliorate the problems identified.
The paper finds that access to digital money is an underappreciated vector by which technological innovation, both financial and non-financial, can be hindered in reaching certain populations. Accessing digital money is easy and free for those with money while for those without a lot of money, digital money is expensive. Digital money’s role as a barrier to accessing new technology, particularly in an app/mobile/online economy, will likely exacerbate existing inequalities and impede adoption of some new technology for lower-income people. To the extent that these new technologies offer health benefits and require digital money, existing public health inequalities will be exacerbated. Fully realizing the potential health and wealth benefits of new technology requires a better solution to the digital payment divide than currently exists.
Key Findings
America’s payment system is designed to segregate people by income and wealth. Access to digital payments is more expensive and difficult to obtain for lower-income households and racial minorities despite decades of continuing growth of usage of digital money. This results in barriers to adoption of new technology, which increasingly requires digital payments. The response to the COVID-19 pandemic exposed several consequences of this problem, resulting in reduced effectiveness of pandemic response and potentially greater health risks due to a lack of access to digital payments.
Linkages between income, wealth, and physical and mental health have been documented. However, prior research has not generally considered the role of payments and access to digital money as impacting either income or health. This paper argues that access to digital money has a direct impact on financial well-being and consequently should factor into determinants of health. In addition, the inability to access digital money easily and cheaply may factor into other elements that have been studied as part of the broader social determinants of health, specifically the ability to access new technologies that require digital payments.
A specific new finding in the paper is that the majority of Americans who use check cashers and the majority of checks cashed are from people with bank accounts. This challenges the notion that being “unbanked” drives use of certain “fringe financial services” such as check cashers. Issues around cost, including the value of immediate payment, drive decisions on how best to access money, whether through bank products or non-bank products.
Table 1: Use of check cashing services, by banking status
The main policy solutions discussed center on enhancing access to digital payments through expansions of the provision of low-cost financial services. The goal is universal access to digital payments at low/no-cost, which should reduce the inequality effects of new technology. A set of policy solutions are being discussed, but more analysis is needed to ensure that proposed solutions correctly identify and address the key challenges, which are primarily centered around cost and timeliness rather than physical locations, hours of operation, or the creation of new forms of digital currency. Inaction in solving these problems intensifies inequality, hampers responses to future pandemics, and reduces the efficacy of other solutions designed to improve public health. The status quo is not static. Technology continues to develop. Absent substantial reform of our nation’s banking and payment systems that lower the cost of accessing and transacting in digital money, millions of Americans will be unable to fully benefit from technological advancement, and that is likely to have health consequences.
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This report was funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The Brookings Institution is financed through the support of a diverse array of foundations, corporations, governments, individuals, as well as an endowment. A list of donors can be found in our annual reports published online here. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions in this report are solely those of its author(s) and are not influenced by any donation.