The economic shutdown and mandatory lockdowns forced many people to limit discretionary spending on retail, food, and entertainment, while stimulus checks and increased unemployment benefits improved financial health in the short term. This aided in a slow down of overdraft.

Since consumers clearly want the personal finance tools developed by fintechs and other innovators, why are banks and credit unions not offering them widely? The core challenge is to get fintech apps to talk with banks’ existing technology stacks and build a shared business case across the organization.

How do we open up our industry’s mindset and encourage banks to restore choice to consumers who want to retake control over their own financial behavior? I have two modest proposals for banks and credit unions to adopt the retronovations as part of their account offerings.

The features of the financial services landscape that have brought today’s consumers convenience, reduced friction, and easily accessed revolving credit have now been with us for so long that we view them as fixed infrastructure. These gains have been accompanied by a loss of some of the tools and habits of mind that helped the grandparents and great-grandparents of today’s Millennials make it through two world wars and the Great Depression.

Keeping a cache of savings for use in emergencies is hard. And it’s hardest for low and moderate income households whose incomes are often volatile and who thus need to tap emergency savings most often.

Installment loans’ appeal, in comparison to credit cards, are the fixed terms — a year or two or three — and equal payment amounts that automatically commit a borrower to paying off the debt.

Imagine going to your smart phone to view your checking balance and seeing two numbers instead of one. The first number is the traditional available balance. The second is an estimate –more often than not, a smaller number — that projects what your balance will be one, two or three days from now.

One important way to avoid running out of money at the ends of the month is to set aside or “earmark” money as it comes in for bills you know you’ll need to pay.

Frequent debit card use makes it difficult to keep a diligent check register that accounts for pending payments. Behaviorally informed personal finance apps and smart checking account features have already begun to remove some of the uncertainties posed by recurring cash management challenges, just as smart meters have taken much of the gambling out of parking.

Much about overdrafting behavior remains a mystery. Given the small amounts and short periods by which overdrafts occur, why aren’t many of them avoidable?

Could overdrafting and payday borrowing actually compound each other, leading to greater use of both products? We asked the banks to compile some key behavioral statistics before and after the discontinuation of their “deposit advance” programs.

When it comes to “small dollar credit,” overdraft is the elephant in the room. The inexplicability of overdrafting — of why a small group of people seems willing to pay so much for transactions that could be easily avoided — has been the subject of policy debates within our industry for some time.

Working in the consumer payments business, you learn a lot about your customers from the timing of their bill pay traffic.

This blog series aims to explore solutions in one area of household finance where innovations by business, technologists, and regulators can all make a positive difference: the cash crunch too many families face at the end of the month, when their bills come due and their bank balances approach zero.