 Thank you for joining. I'm Yana Kachoris, I am from the Chicago Community Trust and I'm talking with Senator Jackie Collins today about how Illinois has cracked down on high interest consumer loans and what's next in the fight to protect black and Latinx communities from predatory lenders. Why is it important that we keep the PLPA, the Predatory Loan Prevention Act in place? So you probably know that with predatory lending it often leads to financial ruin and it was a way of establishing some financial security for families. And I look at financial security more than just dollars and cents because we know whenever a family or individual is under any kind of strain, financial strain, it also impacts their physical and emotional well-being. We also have data to indicate with financial stress and strain that has always been an increase in suicide rates. So this is a way of ensuring and protecting families and when you protect families, you also rebuild communities. Predatory lenders have historically made quite a lot of money off of communities and their profits helped them lobby against some of this regulation, the type of regulation that you were talking about. So are there some of the potential loopholes that industry lobbyists may try and introduce in future bills to whittle away at the protection that were enshrined in the PLPA? Well, I'll just say that at its core predatory lending is really about greed. And when you have greed, there's always going to be a pushback with that much money involved. Because millions and billions of dollars is involved in this industry. So when we were drafting the legislation, even before the legislation became law, we have various entities trying to do carve out, especially the pawn shop owners. And we know now there's been a temporary injunction placed on the legislation by the pawn shop owners who didn't want to see what they were engaging in and it was any kind of loan, right? So when we have those protections, there's room for predatory practices. And so the other ones were the loopholes. During the time we were negotiating the bill, there are other changes being proposed that were put in place, technical changes. The changes that would have meant many of our consumers would still be preyed on in the loss of billions and billions of dollars. And we were able to, because of the oversight of one of the, Woodstock, one of the allies and the advocates in this fight in this battle, Woodstock was able to monitor the legislation and we were aware of the loopholes being proposed and luckily we were able to stop it. But let me just say we still have to remain vigilant because right now I have one of the, I guess, poster child for predatory loans and lending, upfi or upfi financial, trying to put in place legislation to repeal what we've put in place. So we have to stay vigilant. I'd love to get your take on this same question. They have made an incredible amount of money off of black and Latino communities in particular, and they're definitely using that money to fund a really powerful lobby. In Illinois, we've already seen legislation trying to carve out an exempt different types of small consumer loans to make it easier for those industries to keep charging one, two, three times the cost of the loans. The PLPA, the legislation that passed in 2021 is incredibly tight. It's actually really a model for the rest of the country. The language is really tight. So we're expecting that the industry will probably keep trying to change the definition of what is a loan, what types of loans fit under the PLPA. We try to make small changes in language on how APR is calculated so they can go back to charging really high or adding fees and fines that wouldn't be calculated under the APR. And then they may also try to create other exceptions to the legislation that would let specific industries keep charging high rates. Speaking with Brent Adams from the Woodstock Institute, what types of legislation have been used in other states to block the reverse legislation like the PLPA? What types should we be on the lookout in Illinois and Illinois legislators be on the lookout for? The predatory lenders do is what I call the foot in the door strategy that is open the door to just a very specific type of product to be offered under specific types of circumstances. This is a trap. I call it the water balloon effect. If you compress a particular part of the industry, like you would a water balloon, what happens is the part of the industry that's not being compressed expands. Our experience here in Illinois proves that the industry gravitates to the least regulated space. So if you open the door just a little, you're going to find that suddenly that becomes the most popular type of loan for the predatory lenders to offer. So we have to maintain a comprehensive cap in order to ensure that no foot in the doors occur and which would effectively open the door for predatory lending. In this state, what legislators have already needed to be on the lookout for are bills under the guise of technical changes. These technical changes can have huge negative impacts on consumers. So for example, we've had to fight and defeat a bill that would change the way the interest rate is calculated, seemingly an innocuous change, but one that would have profoundly negative impacts on consumers. We were able to successfully define what that bill would do and help therefore defeat it.