In this video presentation Rob Levy from the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) shares some of the findings from the U.S. Financial Diaries project. He explains how the households in the study experience multiple "spikes" and "dips" in income and spending over the course of a single...

CFSI presents their 2017 Financially Underserved Market Size Study that illustrates the growing opportunity to address the needs of financially underserved consumers and identifies significant trends driving marketplace evolution and...

This is the slide deck from the CFSI / Assets & Opportunity Network webinar on Fintech apps to support financial health. The webinar explains financial health, the goal of financial solutions technologies, the FinLab project to help wealther financial shocks through financial technology -...

Americans rely on credit and savings to weather financial shocks and build a better future, but for the financially struggling these tools are often unavailable when they need them. To better understand the intersection between savings and credit for consumers, Visa partnered with CFSI on...

We can educate consumers and provide access to financial products and services. But how do we help consumers use their knowledge and tools to improve their financial behaviour and become financially healthy? With six stories and thirteen project profiles, Designing for Financial Health, leverages...

Cornerstone Advisors, in partnership with the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), produced the following report on strategies for credit unions to attract Gen Y members. The analysis, conducted by Cornerstone Advisors, is based primarily on data from CFSI’s Consumer Financial Health...

More than half of Americans in the tenuous segment live paycheck to paycheck (53%) and struggle to keep up with bills and credit payments. Yet the majority receive regular wages and predictable income. In many ways, individuals in the tenuous segment resemble those in the striving segment, though...

Over 29 million Americans comprise the “at risk” segment – most likely of all the segments to live paycheck to paycheck and run out of money before the end of the month. Seven in ten struggle to keep on top of their bills, and a quarter are actually falling behind on credit and bill...

The Center for Financial Services Innovation is an authority on consumer financial health, leading a network of financial services innovators committed to building better consumer products and practices. The CFSI applied their four Compass Principles (Embrace inclusion, Build trust, Promote...

Millions of small-dollar credit borrowers are set back by predatory lending practices. There is a critical need for high-quality products designed for both borrower success and lender profitability. This report shares an analysis of practices of 16 installment lenders that have adopted some of the...

As a greater share of modern life is encoded into data streams, Big Data tools can enhance the capabilities of a wide range of financial service companies through machine-learning algorithms that get smarter over time, building stronger predictive models as they gather customers and data points....

With approximately 40 million immigrants residing in this country, comprising nearly 13 percent of the total U.S. population, the opportunity to serve this growing community has never been greater. The prospect of a comprehensive reform of the United States immigration system presents banks, credit...

This Guide seeks to define characteristics of a high- quality small-dollar credit product. It does not assume, however, that credit is the answer for every consumer. When people who face a chronic income shortfall or who already have debts they cannot manage use credit to meet their basic needs,...

With so many households struggling to stay afloat following the recession, financial health advocates stopped to consider a critical point: How do we help consumers adopt financial behaviours that lead to improvements in their financial lives? To tackle this question, the Citi Foundation partnered...

To assess the current state of financial health in America and to glean insights that can inform cross-sector efforts to improve consumer outcomes, CFSI designed and commissioned a nationally representative survey focused on consumers’ financial behaviours, attitudes, and preferences. This report...

According to the Center for Financial Services Innovation’s 2014 study on consumer financial health, a whopping sixteen percent of the country is unengaged with their financial situation. This segment earns its name from these consumers’ lack of awareness about their financial lives and their...

Strivers are generally able to make ends meet, but many of them are not satisfied with their current financial situation and are working to better their financial circumstances. This segment differentiates itself by its unusually high rate of planning for irregular expenses, according to the...

Armed with a Financial Capability Innovation Fund grant from the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), Piggymojo is transforming the way people think about savings. The goal of the technology startup is to help underserved consumers increase their savings, combining goal visualization,...

The Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), with support from the Ford Foundation, has undertaken extensive consumer research to examine the needs, decisions, and experiences of SDC consumers, with the goal of promoting the development of high quality SDC solutions. As CFSI defines it,...

Banks and credit unions can and should be doing much more to support consumer credit building – and, importantly, they can do so in ways that align their own success with the success of their customers. CFSI has identified a number of initiatives that financial institutions can implement over the...

For unbanked and underbanked borrowers, ncome supports, budgeting guidance, and additional savings will not entirely fill the need that credit satisfies. First, well-structured credit can support a household’s ability to save. Second, building a credit history is a critical financial asset in its...

The Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) has conducted an investigation into the amounts that prepaid cardholders spend each month to conduct essential financial transactions, and compared that to the amounts that they would spend if they remained underbanked or used checking accounts...

For Tax Year 2002 (the latest for which IRS data is available), nearly 70 million tax filers with incomes under $30,000 received more than $82 billion in federal tax refunds – and more than 21 million filers received nearly $38 billion in the EITC.2 Total refunds in the U.S. exceed $200 billion...

In this video presentation Rob Levy from the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) examines the role of financial institutions in building consumer financial health.  This presentation was given at the Prosper Canada Policy Research Symposium on March 9, 2018. Read the slide deck that...