Commercial Appeal, March 7, 2020: Can a new Community Reinvestment Act stop Memphians from using payday loan shops?
“It’s an old law,” Bryant said. “It’s like using a flip phone compared to a cell phone.”
It is – but one challenge remains: Cutting through the hold that structural poverty has on many Memphians.
Scores of poor Memphians grew up without seeing their parents use banks, and that has led many of them to either not trust banks or believe that banks aren’t for people like them. Many trust the payday lenders because of the familiarity.
But seeing that many struggling people do have mobile phones, and that they do trust technology in that sense, it may ease them into learning how to trust financial institutions.
