AFSA President & CEO Bill Himpler gives an update to members about all the recent happening on Capitol Hill and around the organization.

Earlier this week in comments to North Country Public Radio New York Governor Andrew Cuomo warned that “many New Yorkers are vulnerable to predatory businesses because they are shut out of the banking system.” To help combat the problem, he introduced a banking proposal to invest $25 million over the next five years in the state's Community Development Financial Institutions, which are largely funded via the U.S. Treasury Department’s CDFI program. AFSA recently published a white paper on subsidized loan programs.

You might be knowledgeable enough to change the oil in your car, but are you able to get under the hood of your business and understand cyber security risks?

Tom Miller, a professor and Jack R. Lee Chair in Financial Institutions and Consumer Finance at Mississippi State University and Todd Zywicki, a University Foundation Professor of Law at George Mason University Antonin Scalia School of Law published a must-read piece in Real Clear Policy yesterday.

On January 6, AFSA’s State Government Affairs department published its 2020 State Legislative Preview and 2019 Review white paper. Published monthly, AFSA’s state white papers typically provide a snapshot in time covering a single-issue area; however, the 2020 preview/2019 review provides a broad look at activity affecting AFSA members’ priority issues in the legislative session coming to an end, with a sample of what members can expect from the states over the next year. For a full review of the 2019 session, members can check out the white paper in the State Resources section of AFSA’s website.

AFSA’s federal government affairs team continued to be highly effective in advocating for the protection of consumer credit and choice in 2019. Below are just a few of the 2019 federal successes.

In this episode of the AFSA Extra Credit Podcast, we’re speaking with Frank Salinger, a longtime consultant for and former staff member of AFSA. Frank really needs no introduction – he’s been an integral part of protecting access to consumer credit since he joined the industry in the late 1970’s. We talk about what he’s working on with AFSA now and he gives his opinion on what AFSA members need to be focusing on right now.

TRH Duke & Duchess of Sussex:

Recently, the Department of Defense (DoD) sent a response to 23 Members of Congress who sent a bipartisan letter urging the repeal of Question and Answer #2 of the December 2017 Military Lending Act (MLA) interpretive guidance. In its letter, the DoD writes that Q&A #2 “does not provide an unlimited exception for financing additional credit for purposes not expressly related to the item being purchased.”