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- 2022
- Working Paper
Buy Now, Pay Later Credit: User Characteristics and Effects on Spending Patterns
Firms offering "buy now, pay later" (BNPL) point-of-sale installment loans with minimal underwriting and low interest have captured a growing fraction of the market for short-term unsecured consumer credit. We provide a detailed look into the US BNPL market by...
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- June 29, 2022
- Other Article
Strategic Complexity? Using Experiments to Understand and Overcome Obfuscation
By: Michael Luca, Ginger Zhe Jin and Daniel Martin
Credit card companies must decide what product features to disclose to consumers, such as payment schedules, penalties, and fees--and also whether to present them clearly or bury them in the fine print. Firms face similar choices in settings ranging from privacy...
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- October 2021
- Article
Fintech Borrowers: Lax Screening or Cream-Skimming?
By: Marco Di Maggio and Vincent Yao
Personal credit is the fastest-growing segment of the consumer credit market, mainly driven by fintech lenders' staggering expansion. We study this market using a unique individual-level data, which covers most of the top fintech and traditional lenders, and provides...
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- July 2021
- Article
Medical Debt in the U.S., 2009–2020
By: Ray Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Francis Wong and Wesley Yin
Importance: Medical debt is an increasing concern in the US, yet there is limited understanding of the amount and distribution of medical debt, and its association with health care policies.
Objective: To measure the amount of medical debt nationally and by... View Details
Objective: To measure the amount of medical debt nationally and by... View Details
- Article
The Economic Consequences of Bankruptcy Reform
By: Tal Gross, Ray Kluender, Feng Liu, Matthew J. Notowidigdo and Jialan Wang
A more generous consumer bankruptcy system provides greater insurance against financial risks but may also raise the cost of credit. We study this trade-off using the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), which increased the costs of...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
Accounting for Product Impact in the Consumer Finance Industry
By: George Serafeim and Katie Trinh
We apply the product impact measurement framework of the Impact-Weighted Accounts Initiative (IWAI) in two competitor credit card providers within the consumer finance industry. We design a monetization methodology that allows us to calculate monetary impact estimates...
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Keywords:
Product Innovation;
Impact;
Impact Investing;
Impact Measurement;
ESG;
ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance;
ESG Ratings;
Social Corporate Responsibility;
Corporate Social Responsibility;
Social Impact;
Consumer Finance;
Financial Services;
Financial Inclusion;
Product;
Product Design;
Product Positioning;
Society;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Personal Finance;
Credit Cards;
Financial Services Industry
- 2020
- Working Paper
'Repayment-by-Purchase' Helps Consumers to Reduce Credit Card Debt
By: Grant E. Donnelly, Cait Lamberton, Stephen Bush, Zoe Chance and Michael I. Norton
Many consumers struggle to repay their credit card debt, in part because paying small portions of large bills often feels fruitless. We introduce a novel credit card payment option—repayment-by-purchase—and examine its influence on both the amount consumers’ repay and...
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- August 2020 (Revised May 2021)
- Case
PayPal: The Next Chapter
By: Michael Porter, Mark Kramer and Annelena Lobb
Can a social purpose and stakeholder capitalism confer a powerful competitive advantage in the age of COVID-19? For PayPal, the answer is yes. After spinning off from eBay in a 2015 IPO, the company declared its purpose as "democratizing financial services" by ensuring...
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- March 2020 (Revised October 2020)
- Case
Jeffrey Deitch: Art Entrepreneur
By: Henry McGee, Rohit Deshpandé and Sarah Gulick
Jeffrey Deitch is an influential gallery owner and art entrepreneur. An HBS alumnus generally credited with developing the field of bank art advisory and financing services, Deitch has had a storied career in both the commercial and non-profit art world. Wrestling with...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
The Effects of Information on Credit Market Competition: Evidence from Credit Cards
By: C. Fritz Foley, Agustin Hurtado, Andres Liberman and Alberto Sepulveda
We show empirically that public credit information increases competition in credit markets. We access data that cover all credit card borrowers in Chile and include details about relationship borrowers have with each lender. We exploit a natural experiment whereby a...
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- November 2019 (Revised December 2019)
- Case
Marcus by Goldman Sachs
By: Rory McDonald, Samir Junnarkar and David Lane
Five years on from the 2008 financial crisis, Goldman Sachs remained wounded. Revenues at the global investment bank had stagnated below pre-crisis levels, and the firm had yet to rebound from a substantial decline in securities-trading revenues. Marcus by Goldman...
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- September 2019
- Case
Netflix: A Creative Approach to Culture and Agility
By: Ranjay Gulati, Allison Ciechanover and Jeff Huizinga
By 2018, Netflix had been credited for revolutionizing how viewers consumed entertainment—shifting from ad-fueled linear network programming to a highly personalized, on-demand, all-you-can-consume, ad-free model. The company was riding a long wave of revenue and...
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Keywords:
Digital Technologies;
Streaming;
Video On Demand;
International Expansion;
Leadership;
Information Technology;
Entrepreneurship;
Innovation and Management;
Innovation Strategy;
Leadership Style;
Management Style;
Organizational Culture;
Entertainment;
Media;
Change Management;
Expansion;
Technology Industry;
United States
- 2021
- Working Paper
Improving Customer Compatibility with Tradeoff Transparency
By: Ryan W. Buell and MoonSoo Choi
Through a large-scale field experiment with 393,036 customers considering opening a credit card account with a nationwide retail bank, we investigate how providing transparency into an offering’s tradeoffs affects subsequent rates of customer acquisition and long-run...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety Through Access to Human Contact
By: Michelle A. Shell and Ryan W. Buell
It is a well-established result in social psychology that when people feel anxious, they seek advice from others. However, increasingly companies that operate in high-anxiety settings (like financial services, health care, and education) are deploying self-service...
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- 2018
- Working Paper
Good Credit and the Good Life: Credit Scores Predict Subjective Well-Being
By: Joe J. Gladstone and Ashley V. Whillans
Can money buy happiness? To examine this question, research in economics, psychology, and sociology has focused almost exclusively on examining the associations between income, spending or wealth and subjective well-being. Moving beyond this research, we provide the...
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Keywords:
Well-being;
Credit Scores;
Consumer Finance;
Emotions;
Credit;
Personal Finance;
Welfare;
Happiness
- June 2018 (Revised January 2019)
- Case
Membership Rewards® from American Express
By: Shelle Santana, Frances X. Frei and Lauren G. Pickle
Credit and charge card issuer American Express (Amex) had developed a strong reputation among consumers due in part to its Membership Rewards (MR) loyalty program, first established in 1991. Through MR, all Amex cardholders could accumulate and redeem “points” based on...
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- October 2017 (Revised April 2019)
- Case
Data Breach at Equifax
By: Suraj Srinivasan, Quinn Pitcher and Jonah S. Goldberg
The case discusses the events leading up to the massive data breach at Equifax, one of the three U.S. credit reporting companies, the organizational and governance issues that contributed to the breach, and the consequences of the breach. The case supplement provides...
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- September 2017 (Revised November 2018)
- Case
Chase Sapphire: Creating a Millennial Cult Brand
By: Shelle Santana, Jill Avery and Christine Snively
The launch of the Chase Sapphire Reserve credit card was enthusiastically received by millennial consumers, a cohort that had previously eluded JPMorgan Chase and its competitors. With the one-year anniversary of the launch approaching, managers are focused on...
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Keywords:
Brand ＆ Product Management;
Product Strategy;
New Product Development;
Credit Card;
Customer Acquisition;
CRM;
Millennials;
Marketing;
Marketing Strategy;
Brands and Branding;
Credit Cards;
Product Development;
Product Launch;
Customer Relationship Management;
Consumer Behavior;
Demographics;
Financial Services Industry;
Service Industry;
Banking Industry;
United States;
North America
- March 2017 (Revised March 2019)
- Case
Ant Financial (A)
By: Feng Zhu, Ying Zhang, Krishna G. Palepu, Anthony K. Woo and Nancy Hua Dai
Headquartered in Hangzhou (China), Ant Financial has grown into a fintech “Unicorn.” The fintech empire that the company established spanned verticals such as mobile and online payment (Alipay), money market fund (Yu’e Bao), wealth management (Ant Fortune),...
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- September 2016
- Case
Financial Services at Falabella (A)
By: C. Fritz Foley and Agustin M. Hurtado
In 2010, the board and senior management team of Falabella, a leading retailer with operations throughout Latin America, faced choices about what to do with its financial services division. More than 4.5 million customers had CMR credit cards that could be used in...
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