The failure of banks to meet the needs of the 99%—and the cottage industries filling the gap—are thoughtfully explored in this startling and absorbing exposé from Servon, a professor of city and ...

Editor’s Note: Lisa Servon, a professor of city planning at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying low-income neighborhoods for 20 years, so she was stumped by the continuing — in fact, ...

Payday lenders and check cashers have never been more popular with consumers. There are more payday lenders in the U.S. than there are McDonald's locations and Starbucks combined. Yet their business ...

Banks haven’t always been the giant, impersonal corporations Americans today are familiar with. For much of the twentieth century, they were more commonly small, community institutions that helped ...

Lisa Servon is professor of city planning at the University of Pennsylvania and former dean at The New School. She is the author of "The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives." The ...

• University of Pennsylvania professor Lisa Servon went to work as a teller at a check-cashing store to find out why customers use the service. • Prevailing wisdom holds that customers would be better ...

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Lisa Servon: I was interested in why so many people were using alternative financial services … Payday lenders, check cashers, pawnshops … when the story about them that you hear in the press, and ...