Money, in brief

Since 15 July 2026, a company that lets a British shopper split a purchase into instalments counts as a lender and is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, Britain's financial regulator. [1][2]

Parliament gave the regulator that power for the first time this year. Before the rules started, this kind of credit carried none of the protections attached to a credit card or a personal loan. [3][4]

Lenders must now check that a person can afford to repay before each agreement, even a small one, and must hand over set information before anyone signs. [1][3][5]

If a payment is missed, the lender has to make contact and explain what happens next, rather than passing the person straight to a debt collector. [1][3]

Shoppers can now take a complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service, the free British body that settles arguments between customers and financial firms. [1][3]

Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act now applies to these purchases. If the shop never delivers, the buyer can claim the money from the lender as well as from the shop. [1][3]

That right starts at 100 pounds, and the credit reference agency Experian puts the average buy now, pay later purchase at about 60 pounds. So most purchases sit below it. [3]

Eleven million people in Britain use the product, on the regulator's count. The market went from 60m pounds in 2017 to more than 13bn pounds in 2024, and use rose from 14 percent to 25 percent of UK adults in a single year. [2][3]

Fair4All Finance, a not-for-profit body set up through a UK government department to widen access to finance, says up to 30 percent of current users could be refused under the new checks. It says nearly half of those have never missed a payment. [3]

Two gaps remain. Agreements signed before 15 July 2026 are not covered, and the rules only bite when the lender and the shop are separate businesses. [1]

The regulator says it does not want to reduce access to credit, and that firms can tailor how hard they check depending on the product and the customer. [4]

Kept to the schedule, the product charges no interest and no fees. Miss a payment and late fees follow, and in some cases a mark on a credit file. [3]

Why it matters. Watch the share of applications refused: Fair4All Finance says up to 30 percent, and the regulator has said only that some regular users may find access harder. [3][4]

Forty-three members of the US Congress asked three federal agencies to act against companies that charge veterans for help with disability benefit claims. Accredited representatives do that work free. Erik Jensen, 67, who served 30 years in the US Navy, paid Trajector Medical 12,000 dollars. The letter followed an NPR investigation and calls the firms claim sharks, saying they charge illegal fees and use a gap in federal law to escape accountability. It was signed by 42 Democrats and one Republican. [8]

Why it matters. The money comes out of a disability payment meant to compensate an injury. Every dollar of fee is a dollar the benefit was supposed to deliver.

Britain's financial regulator has formed a taskforce with the solicitors' regulator, the advertising watchdog and the data protection office to tackle claims-management companies and law firms working the car finance compensation scheme. Alison Walters, the taskforce lead at the financial regulator, said the scheme is free and nobody needs a firm to use it. The taskforce names unsolicited advertising, meritless claims and unfair exit fees as its first targets. [9]

Why it matters. The compensation is paid to drivers who were overcharged. A share of it now leaves again as fees to firms filing a form the regulator supplies.

The financial and solicitors' regulators said in a joint message that they have seen clients with up to four different representatives on the same car finance claim. Cancelling the duplicates can trigger termination fees the regulators say could be judged excessive. They told firms to check whether a client already has a representative before signing them up, and said adverts must not lead people into new agreements without realising. [10]

Why it matters. A person who signs twice is not being greedy. Each firm's advert looks like the first news of the claim, and the contracts are what charge for the mistake.

The US consumer regulator asked a federal court to order DMB Financial, a Massachusetts debt settlement company operating in at least 24 states, to pay customers at least 5.4m dollars plus a penalty. The regulator said DMB charged upfront fees before it had settled anything and hid the true cost of its service, which federal telemarketing rules forbid. The case began with a lawsuit filed in December 2020. [11]

Why it matters. Debt settlement is sold to people who cannot pay their bills. An upfront fee takes money from the exact pot that was meant to buy the settlement.

Companies that negotiate down unsecured debts in the United States charge between 10 and 29 percent of the debt a customer enrols, on NerdWallet's comparison of seven of the largest. Most set a minimum debt of 7,500 or 10,000 dollars before they will take a customer. The firms also quote typical savings of 15 to 30 percent after their own fees are deducted. [12]

Why it matters. The fee is a share of the debt, not of the saving. Someone enrolling 20,000 dollars can owe several thousand in fees before a single creditor agrees to anything.

A debt management plan does a similar job through a non-profit credit counselling agency in the United States. It rolls unsecured debts such as credit cards into one monthly payment at a reduced interest rate, over three to five years. It does not cover mortgages, car loans or student debt. NerdWallet notes it damages a credit score less than debt settlement or bankruptcy does. [13]

Why it matters. Two routes out of the same debt sit side by side, and the one with a sales team is the one most people meet first.

The US consumer regulator states plainly that no company can legally remove information from a credit report that is current, accurate and negative, and says anyone claiming otherwise is probably running a credit repair scam. Most negative entries drop off after seven years on their own. People can dispute errors, duplicates and entries caused by identity theft, and the credit reporting companies must remove those. [14][15][16]

Why it matters. The paid service is selling a result the law does not allow it to produce. The free dispute process handles the cases where anything can be done.

Pay for delete is an arrangement where someone pays a US debt collector and the collector wipes the collection account from their credit reports. NerdWallet reports that such deals are rare. Anyone who reports to the credit bureaus must report accurately and completely, though a collector may choose not to report at all, which NerdWallet calls a grey area. A deal also covers only the collection account, not the late payments the original lender reported, and those stay for seven years. [17]

Why it matters. It is a payment for an outcome the payer cannot enforce, made at the moment they have the least room to argue.

Child Trust Funds were opened by the UK government for every child born between 1 September 2002 and 2 January 2011, usually starting with a voucher worth 250 pounds, or 500 pounds for low-income families. More than 750,000 accessible accounts have never been claimed, holding more than 2,000 pounds each on average. Kae Tapscott, 18, from Tredegar in Wales, found 4,000 pounds he had never heard of, using a free finder run by the Share Foundation. [18]

Why it matters. Kae said he assumed the UK government would just send it. Nobody's job was to tell him, and the accounts sit with whichever provider holds them until someone asks.

Florida returned more than 847m dollars of unclaimed money to owners between July 2025 and July 2026, and still held more than 4.5bn dollars across over 13 million accounts at its last count in March 2026. The state's own portal says one in five Floridians has money waiting. A law signed on 26 June 2026 adds certified-mail notices for property worth 1,000 dollars or more, and requires anything over 10 dollars to appear on the searchable site. It does not return the money automatically. [19]

Why it matters. The new law improves the notice and leaves the work where it was. The owner still has to search, prove who they are and file.

About 25 percent of the money in American 401(k) workplace pension pots is left with former employers or forgotten by its owners. That is from a survey by Capitalize, a firm that helps people find and combine old accounts. That works out at roughly 2.1 trillion dollars. Accounts get stranded when someone changes job, moves house or dies without the plan being told. [20]

Why it matters. This is retirement saving that was already paid for and already taxed. It is separated from its owner by an address change, not by a loss.

More than half a million personal bankruptcies were filed in the United States last year, a jump of nearly 50 percent in three years, on figures from the Administrative Office of the US Courts. Filings at the end of March were up almost 12 percent on a year earlier. The level is still below where it sat before the pandemic. Sasha Indarte, a finance professor at the Wharton School, said it shows people having a harder time meeting what they owe. [21]

Why it matters. Bankruptcy is the last door, and more people are walking through it. The first step is proving to a court that the debts cannot be paid.

Lawsuits filed by debt collectors over unpaid credit card bills and other balances have reached their highest level in years, on a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts, a US research organisation. In several states and metropolitan areas, filings in 2025 ran above where they were before the pandemic, continuing a rise that started the year before. [22]

Why it matters. A lawsuit is how a debt stops being a letter and becomes something a court can enforce against wages or a bank account.

A default judgment is what a US court issues when someone sued, usually by a debt collector, does not respond. The judge decides without hearing their side, and the person suing wins. A defendant generally has 20 to 30 days to answer a court summons. Once the judgment is entered, the collector can move to collection powers such as taking money from wages. [23]

Why it matters. The rise in filings above matters most here. Whether the debt was correct is never tested if nobody answers the letter.

The US consumer regulator ordered Commonwealth Financial Systems, a medical debt collector based in Dickson City, Pennsylvania, to stop operating and pay a 95,000 dollar penalty. The regulator said the firm kept trying to collect medical debts after customers disputed them, without checking whether the debts were real, and failed to tell credit reporting companies the entries were disputed. That breaches two US laws on fair collection and credit reporting. [24]

Why it matters. One in five US households reports overdue medical debt in collections, so the practice reaches a wide group. [25]

The US consumer regulator says that when a landlord or a utility company hands unpaid rent or bills to someone else to collect, that person is a debt collector under federal law. That covers a law firm acting for the landlord as much as a collection agency. The same rules apply: no harassment, and no false or misleading statements to get the money. [26]

Why it matters. Rent arrears feel like a private argument with a landlord, and the moment they are sold or referred, a different set of rules starts applying to both sides.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission issued a policy statement letting companies going public require shareholders to settle disputes in private arbitration instead of court, and changed its own rules so nobody can challenge those findings. Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw dissented, saying the statement identifies no problem and never discusses what the change will do in practice. She argued that the cost of individual arbitration means most small shareholders will simply not bring a claim. [27]

Why it matters. Arbitration is a private hearing with a paid decision-maker instead of a public court. Which venue a dispute lands in is decided years before anyone knows what the dispute will be.

Securities class actions brought by shareholders returned about 3.7bn dollars to harmed investors in 2024, against roughly 345m dollars returned by US market regulator enforcement over a similar period, on figures in Commissioner Crenshaw's statement. The regulator separately reported 456 enforcement actions in the year to 30 September 2025, with monetary relief ordered totalling 17.9bn dollars. Ordered and returned are different counts, and the 17.9bn figure is not money in investors' hands. [27][29]

Why it matters. The gap explains why the venue matters. If group lawsuits shrink, the route that actually pays money back shrinks with them.

Arbitration clauses appear in contracts for everything from bank accounts to private student loans in the United States, and affect tens of millions of people. Either side can use one to stop a lawsuit reaching court, and the clauses usually also bar group claims inside arbitration. The US consumer regulator, setting out a proposal to ban that second part, said the result is that however many people are harmed by the same conduct, each must sue alone, and few do. [28]

Why it matters. For a 30-dollar loss, suing alone costs more than the loss. Banning group claims does not reduce the harm, it reduces the number of claims.

Britain's Competition and Markets Authority opened investigations into eight companies over online pricing: the ticket resellers StubHub and Viagogo, AA Driving School and BSM Driving School, the gym chain Gold's Gym, and the retailers Wayfair, Appliances Direct and Marks Electrical. It named drip pricing, where fees appear later in a purchase, and pressure selling. These were the first cases brought under the watchdog's new consumer protection powers. [30]

Why it matters. Drip pricing works on the order of events. The total arrives after the point where a shopper has stopped comparing.

Britain's competition watchdog has ordered vet practices to publish price lists, provide a written estimate before any treatment expected to cost 500 pounds or more, and say when a practice belongs to a large chain. Written prescription fees will be capped at 21 pounds for the first medicine and 12.50 pounds for each extra one. Pet owners spent more than 6.7bn pounds on veterinary and other services in 2024, about 390 pounds for every pet-owning household. Chain practices should show standard price lists before Christmas. [31]

Why it matters. Martin Coleman, who chaired the inquiry, said owners are left in the dark about who owns their practice and what treatment costs, while facing bills in the thousands.

Nicole Hawley, 26, was given two choices by an emergency vet after her dog Ernie inhaled a grass seed that became infected: put him down, or pay about 12,000 pounds for surgery. She was between pet insurance policies, so she and her partner took out a loan and spent money saved for their wedding. Veterinary prices rose 63 percent over seven years, nearly twice the rate of inflation, the competition watchdog's Martin Coleman told BBC Radio 4. [32]

Why it matters. The price arrives at the one moment nobody shops around. That is why the remedy the watchdog reached for was publishing prices in advance.

After US rules banned surprise fees added at the end of a transaction, Ticketmaster dropped its order processing fee, which it usually shared with the venue. Documents obtained by the Guardian show it then raised other fees to make the money back. In an email to the Findlay Toyota Center in Arizona, the company wrote that it had to adjust fees to offset the revenue loss. That venue dropped a six dollar order processing fee and added two dollars to the service fee on every ticket. [33]

Why it matters. The rule changed when a fee could be shown, not how much a ticket costs. Experts told the Guardian that rolling a banned fee into another charge could itself breach the fee rules.

Britain's competition watchdog opened an investigation into Euro Car Parks, which runs more than 3,000 sites across the UK and Ireland with more than two million cars a day, over tickets issued at petrol station forecourts. Drivers reported charges for charging an electric car, putting air in tyres, or queueing for a pump, and said the rules were not clearly signed. Lisa Webb of the consumer group Which? welcomed the investigation. [34]

Why it matters. A parking charge is a private invoice, not a fine from the state, and the signs are the whole of the contract a driver is said to have agreed to.

The US Federal Trade Commission sent a warning to more than 200 car dealerships telling them to stop advertising vehicles online with questionable discounts or thousands of dollars in hidden fees. The Wall Street Journal reports that not all of them changed, and that buyers still meet thousands of dollars in fees they cannot easily read, while the industry works out how to adapt. [35]

Why it matters. A warning changes what a dealer may advertise. What a buyer is shown at the desk, after choosing the car, is a separate question.

The US tax office and the Bureau of Fiscal Service can take all or part of a federal tax refund to cover an existing debt, including past-due child support and money owed to other federal agencies. This is called a refund offset. The Taxpayer Advocate Service, the independent office inside the tax administration, sets out how to check for a debt that would trigger one, and how to ask for the refund to be paid instead where losing it would cause hardship. [36]

Why it matters. A refund is usually money already earned and over-withheld. It can leave before it ever arrives, and the hardship route only exists for people who know to ask before filing.

In the United States, a debt a lender gives up on is normally treated as income to the person who owed it, and gets reported to the tax office. The tax office says that money does not have to be included to the extent the person was insolvent, meaning their debts exceeded what they owned. It is also excluded when the debt was discharged in a bankruptcy case. Claiming either exclusion means filing Form 982. [37]

Why it matters. Relief and a tax bill arrive in the same envelope, and the exclusions that cancel the bill only apply if somebody files for them.

A US federal tax debt carries a collection statute expiry date, generally ten years from the day the tax was assessed, after which the tax office can no longer collect it. Certain events add time to that clock. The date appears on a taxpayer's account transcript, and people who think it has been calculated wrongly can ask the Taxpayer Advocate Service for help. [38]

Why it matters. The clock runs whether or not anybody looks at it, and the date is only visible to someone who knows the transcript exists.

A levy is the US tax office taking property to settle a tax debt, and it reaches further than most people expect: wages, bank accounts, vehicles, real estate and other personal property can be seized and sold. It follows a bill headed Final Notice of Intent to Levy and Notice of Your Right to A Hearing. A levy served on an employer or a customer is binding on them too, not just on the person who owes. [39]

Why it matters. This is the step where a number on a letter becomes something that leaves a bank account without anyone's agreement.

Britain's consumer credit rules cover a lender that has agreed a repayment arrangement with a borrower in arrears. It must reduce, waive or cancel further interest and charges, so the debt does not grow while the borrower keeps to the plan. The same rulebook tells firms to assess income and expenditure objectively, and lists mortgage, rent, council tax, food and utility bills as essential living costs that come first. [40]

Why it matters. Without that rule a plan can be kept perfectly and the balance still rises, which is how people repay for years and owe more at the end.

Britain's financial regulator has published findings on second charge mortgages, loans taken against the value of a home on top of the existing mortgage. They are under 4 percent of regulated mortgage sales, carry higher interest rates than a main mortgage, and are mostly used to consolidate other debts. The regulator says borrowers therefore often already carry a lot of debt and show signs of being in a vulnerable position. [41]

Why it matters. The loan is secured on the home. Rolling unsecured debts into it converts a credit card problem into a housing one.