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Discussion Paper
How Does Buy Now, Pay Later Affect Customers’ Credit?
In this paper, we explore the relationship between consumers’ use of buy now, pay later (BNPL) and their credit reports. BNPL is a deferred payment tool that allows consumers to split transactions into four payments over six weeks. Unlike many other financial products, it is offered primarily by fintech companies and advertised to consumers as free from fees and credit checks. These providers typically do not report a consumer’s use of BNPL and subsequent repayment behavior to credit bureaus, which makes studies of BNPL users’ credit more challenging. In this analysis, however, we ...
Discussion Paper
How Well Do Survey Self-Reports Align with Administrative Data? The Case of U.S. Consumer Credit Records
This paper assesses how closely consumers’ self-reported credit and debt attributes (such as credit account ownership and balances) align with administrative credit bureau records for mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards. Understanding the contents of one’s credit report can be critical to consumers’ ability to obtain affordable credit and to their ability to manage their finances generally. Surveys often ask respondents to report the types and amounts of credit they have, but it is often difficult or impossible to determine if the reported information is accurate. In this paper, we ...
Discussion Paper
Consumer Payment Preferences and the Impact of Technology and Regulation: Insights from the Visa Payment Panel Study
The Consumer Finance Institute hosted a workshop in August 2018 featuring Michael Marx, senior director at Visa, Inc., to discuss recent data from the Visa Payment Panel, highlighting the evolution of consumer payment preferences since the Great Recession and the passage of the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009. A number of intriguing trends were discussed. Debit card adoption and growth have shown signs of slowing, even as regulatory changes have increased its prevalence recently among younger consumers. Credit card usage continues to grow and has ...
Discussion Paper
Meet People Where They Are: Building Formal Credit Using Informal Financial Traditions
The Consumer Finance Institute hosted a workshop in February 2019 featuring Jos Quionez, chief executive officer, and Elena Fairley, programs director, of Mission Asset Fund (MAF) to discuss MAF?s approach to helping its clients improve access to mainstream financial markets. MAF?s signature program, Lending Circles, adapts a traditional community-based financial tool known as a rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) to help establish or expand credit reports for participants who may not be able to do so through traditional means. Lending Circles have served more than 10,000 clients ...
Discussion Paper
Developing a Customer-Driven Credit Card: Testing Consumer-Issuer Collaboration in the Barclays Ring Community
The Consumer Finance Institute hosted a workshop in November 2018, featuring Paul Wilmore, then chief marketing officer of Barclays US, to discuss the Barclays Ring credit card program. Through the Ring online community, Barclays engages cardholders directly in the program management, sharing detailed profit and loss data, seeking input on program features, and soliciting ideas on how to better create a relationship between the issuer and the customer. Wilmore reviewed the history of the Ring program and provided an overview of the key successes and challenges Barclays has encountered. This ...
Discussion Paper
Meet People Where They Are: Building Formal Credit Using Informal Financial Traditions
The Consumer Finance Institute hosted a workshop in February 2019 featuring José Quiñonez, chief executive officer, and Elena Fairley, programs director, of Mission Asset Fund (MAF) to discuss MAF’s approach to helping its clients improve access to mainstream financial markets. MAF’s signature program, Lending Circles, adapts a traditional community-based financial tool known as a rotating savings and credit association (ROSCA) to help establish or expand credit reports for participants who may not be able to do so through traditional means. Lending Circles have served more than 10,000 ...
Discussion Paper
Contactless Payment Cards: Trends and Barriers to Consumer Adoption in the U.S.
Since 2017, the payment cards industry has undertaken a concerted effort to bring contactless “tap-and-pay” credit and debit card products to consumers. Payment networks, card issuers, and banks have worked to ensure that contactless cards, which communicate payment information wirelessly to point-of-sale terminals through Near Field Communication technology, are at the forefront of consumers’ minds when they make a purchase. Missing from the discussion of contactless payments, however, is an understanding of consumer interest in the technology; indeed, the current activities are a ...
Discussion Paper
How Does Buy Now, Pay Later Affect Customers’ Credit?
This paper explores the relationship between consumers’ use of buy now, pay later (BNPL) and their credit reports. We conduct this analysis to evaluate concerns that BNPL use could negatively affect consumers’ financial health.
Working Paper
Savings Versus Debt: The Effects of Survey Question Order on Consumers’ Reported Financial Priorities
Survey after survey indicates that building savings and reducing debt are among the top financial goals for many Americans. However, because of limited resources and inherent trade-offs, achieving these two goals can be challenging and often requires prioritizing one goal over the other. We conduct two survey experiments with national samples of U.S. adults to understand how individuals balance saving and paying off debt, while taking into account survey context and question effects that might influence self-reports of behaviors. Both studies find a significant question order effect, in which ...
Report
Why Some Americans Don’t Invest in the Stock Market
This report presents findings from the January 2025 LIFE Survey on stock market participation and explores the factors that discourage individuals from investing. We find that, among nonowners in the underrepresented groups, limited financial knowledge was reported as a major barrier to investing, significantly more often than nonowners from their demographic counterparts. Indeed, these group differences in subjective financial knowledge were reflected in an objective measure of financial literacy across the full sample, with individuals from underrepresented groups displaying lower levels of ...