Demographics

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Bucking a trend, U.S. Bancorp is moving forward with its plans to develop self-serve financial kiosks, despite lingering questions in the industry about whether they can generate profits.

Over the last six years Central National Bank and Trust Co. in Enid, Okla., has reported steady growth in fee income, in part because of its marketing of gift, payroll, and remittance cards in communities where it operates.

A Manhattan Beach, Calif., credit union says its acquisition of a Los Angeles check casher and payday lender should result in more competitive pricing for short-term loans in southern California.

The prepaid card provider Postilion, a division of S1 Corp., and Central National Bank and Trust Co. in Enid, Okla., said Monday that they had formed a partnership to offer prepaid cards to the bank's partner financial institutions.

The mayor of New Haven has introduced a dual-purpose identification and stored-value card aimed in part at improving access to mainstream financial services for the city's illegal immigrants.

Once focused solely on credit cards, Capital One Financial Corp. is expanding rapidly into the debit market and says its latest deal, for one of the top prepaid debit companies, will lure a new slice of customers to its other products.

The payday lender Ezcorp Inc. is offering a reloadable prepaid card that gives $300 in overdraft protection to people who direct-deposit their paychecks onto the card.

Total System Services Inc. said it is processing the prepaid card Wal-Mart Stores Inc. introduced with great fanfare this year.

A nonprofit that works to improve financial services for the underbanked has launched a for-profit investment fund to finance companies that serve such people.

Wells Fargo & Co. will announce today that it will waive or reduce remittance fees for its customers, and that it now offers money transfers to recipients without bank accounts in five countries.

After repeated delays, CheckSpring Bank, a New York City start-up that plans to make check cashing a core service, has secured the necessary capital and hopes to open its first branch, in the Bronx, by October.

H&R Block Inc.'s results showed that the mortgage unit it has agreed to sell continues to lose a significant amount of money, but also provided evidence that it is making progress in building a consumer financial services business to augment its core tax-preparation line.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. detailed its plan to continue to expand in the money-services business.

After 15 years in subprime consumer lending, Bruce Hammersley says "the opportunity to lead in a market that has tremendous growth opportunity" led him to quit HSBC Holdings PLC for a fledgling marketer of prepaid cards.

Community banks have left the remittance business mostly to large banks and money-services businesses, but a Washington consumer finance company that largely targets Hispanics is trying to change that.

As banks and other financial services companies look for ways to profit by serving the country's estimated 40 million underbanked consumers, private-equity firms and hedge funds are scouting for opportunities in the sector as well.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. has been late to the game of developing a Mexican remittance program, but on Wednesday it said it has completed the expansion of a pilot test to all its markets.

Financial services companies are paying closer attention to places like Albany, N.Y., and Toledo as they try to reach a growing population of underbanked Hispanic immigrants living in and around smaller U.S. cities.