Chicago's Urban Partnership Bank held a Customer Appreciation Day to celebrate the Bank's fourth anniversary. Each branch provided refreshments and offered an opportunity to win tickets to a Chicago Sky basketball game. At the South Shore Summer Festival, Urban Partnership volunteers donated their time to share information about the impact of their financial services and products. Volunteers from Urban Partnership Bank also teamed up with the Gary Comer Youth Center for a gardening day, harvesting crops, prepping soil and helping build winter hoop houses.

A Bloomberg investigation has uncovered a secret financing network which connects investors including Harvard University to payday lenders. At the center of the network is Vector Capital IV, a San Francisco private-equity fund run by Alex Slusky. Slusky's fund consisted of $1.2 billion in funds raised from investors including Harvard University, who were told the fund would buy and turn around struggling software companies. But Slusky struggled to find enough companies to buy. When Harvard, fed up with delays, tried to pull out, Slusky invested the funds in Cane Bay Partners, owners of a network of payday-lending websites which uses overseas charters in Belize and the Virgin Islands to obscure ownership and circumvent U.S. usury laws.

Banks are making less of their money from customer-account fees than at any time in the past seven decades as strict government rules and changing consumer behavior squeeze a major source of revenue. After peaking in 2009, the annual account fees collected at U.S. banks have declined, even as the volume of bank deposits has swelled. The fees have dropped nearly 21% to $32.5 billion last year from $41.1 billion in 2009, reversing a trend of fee growth that had lasted since 1942. Fees have become less profitable since 2010, when the Federal Reserve put in place a new regulation requiring that customers had to explicitly opt-in for overdraft coverage. Customers are also making greater use of Internet and mobile banking solutions which make it easier to check balances and avoid overdrafts.

A HUD program to sell its most delinquent mortgages to private investors is producing modest returns when it comes to keeping those struggling borrowers in their homes. To date, 2,049 mortgages sold to investors under the program have been reworked to allow the delinquent borrowers to remain in their homes and start making payments again, although the overwhelming majority of the 73,000 sold troubled mortgages have been foreclosed on. Roughly half of the loans remain delinquent and have yet to be reworked, sold or foreclosed. HUD began selling the mortgages to private investors in an attempt to reduce the federal government’s potential exposure. Officials have said private buyers have a better chance of reworking the mortgages because the loans are bought at a significant discount.