Free Republic

Snips from excerpt only website: Millions of low-income Americans who don't have bank accounts are finding an alternative to check-cashing stores at an unusual place: their local big-box retailer. Kmart has begun testing check cashing, money transfers and prepaid cards in stores in Illinois, California and Puerto Rico, with plans to roll out the services nationally later this year. Best Buy has installed kiosks in its stores for shoppers to pay utility, cable and phone bills. Wal-Mart has opened roughly 1,500 MoneyCenters that process as many as 5 million transactions each week. According to a recent government survey, nearly 30...

Federal limits on debit card processing fees will force banks to charge customers more for services, making accounts too expensive for as many as 5 percent of customers, JPMorgan Chase & Co's chief executive said on Friday. The rules, proposed as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, would cap the fees that merchants pay banks for processing debit card transactions at 12 cents each. That is almost 75 percent less than the average 44 cents per transaction that banks get now. U.S. banks could lose about $13 billion of their annual industry debit processing revenues because of the rules,...