Cassie Owens has a great post at Next City on the potential impact of financial services offered by a local post office. Having the USPS offer financial services has a lot of appeal. Most importantly, it would give the unbanked an option other than predatory lenders. What I didn’t know is that the Postal Service can do some of this without Congressional authorization.
Though the USPS would need to be a “chartered institution” to offer checking accounts (regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation), it could offer saving accounts, pre-paid debit cards and small-dollar loans as simply a huge non-bank financial institution…
While the Post Office can’t dive in to postal banking unchecked, it certainly has a considerable freedom to grow and experiment that it has not exercised…
“We are currently meeting with OIG [Office of the Inspector General] staff to discuss more detailed information on the income that could be generated from offering new or expanded financial services.”
This is an idea to keep an eye on. I imagine the major retail banking institutions (and those predatory lenders who claim they aren’t a blight on society) would fight against this. That and the complicated nature of entering the financial services market is causing the USPS to tread gingerly. Hopefully, we’ll see some movement on this in the coming year.
Read the entire post at Next City: How Post Office Banking Could Help the Unbanked Without Congress.
Jorge Cruz Santos 