Experts say the LendUp case is significant for firms in the emerging online fintech sector that claim to offer a better alternative to payday loans

A Google-funded lending startup will have to pay $6.3m in fines and refunds for a number of deceptive practices, signaling the US governments interest in regulating the growing industry of online alternatives to traditional payday loans.

LendUp a San Francisco firm that claims to offer a secure, convenient way to get the money you need, fast misled customers, hid its true credit costs, and reversed pricing without disclosing it to consumers, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

LendUp pitched itself as a consumer-friendly, tech-savvy alternative to traditional payday loans, but it did not pay enough attention to the consumer financial laws, bureau director Richard Cordray said in a statement Tuesday, announcing the settlement.

The company, which has funding from high-profile Silicon Valley venture capital firms and GV, Googles venture capital branch, began marketing its services in 2012.

The startup claimed it would help consumers move up the LendUp Ladder by building credit and improving their scores. The firm promised customers the opportunity to eventually progress to loans with more favorable terms, such as longer repayment periods and lower rates.

But regulators allege that the startups offerings did not match its advertising and that the firm failed to properly provide information to credit reporting companies, which denied consumers the opportunity to enhance their credit.

The federal agency has ordered LendUp to pay a $1.8m penalty and provide more than 50,000 consumers with roughly $1.8m in refunds.

The California department of business oversight also investigated the firm and announced a settlement this week requiring LendUp to pay $2.7m to resolve allegations it charged illegal fees and committed other widespread violations of payday and installment lending laws.

The state agency said the startup had paid $1m in refunds but still owes $537,000 to borrowers.

Experts say the case is significant for firms in the emerging online fintech sector that have claimed to offer better services than traditional payday loan industry businesses, known for trapping low-income Americans in cycles of debt.

Companies like LendUp have attracted positive press from the tech media in recent years.

TechCrunch said the startup would make the loan experience for the millions of unbanked Americans more fair and transparent. Time Magazine said it offered an innovative new payday loan banking model thats more Silicon Valley than Wall Street.

The violations raise questions about that kind of praise and suggest that regulators must do a better job scrutinizing online startups, said Liana Molina, director of community engagement for the California Reinvestment Coalition, a group that advocates for fair banking access for low-income communities.

The main takeaway here is that online payday loans … are just as dangerous if not more so than those products available in the storefronts, she said, adding that restrictions across the board need to be strengthened to better shield vulnerable people from harmful loans.

Theres a lot more work to be done [but] it sends a strong message to quote-unquote innovators in this space that they need to adhere to existing protections.

In June, the CFPB pushed forward new rules aimed at regulating the $38.5bn payday loan industry, requiring lenders to verify the income of borrowers to ensure they can afford to repay the loans.

As a result, digital lending services are rapidly expanding, said Paige Marta Skiba, Vanderbilt University economist and law professor. Were about to see the kind of wild wild west of online lending.

This weeks enforcement actions could impede funding efforts for LendUp and its competitors, which could have hurt companies trying to offer fairer alternatives, Skiba added.

People willing to invest in this kind of startup are going to be all the more scared Its going to be difficult, if not impossible.

LendUp downplayed the penalties in a statement, saying the penalties address legacy issues that mostly date back to our early days as a company, when we were a seed-stage startup with limited resources and as few as five employees.

The firm now has dedicated compliance and legal teams and has fully addressed the issues cited by our regulators, including discontinuing some services, the statement said.

The LendUp penalties are also noteworthy given that Google, a key funder, announced this year that it would no longer sell ads for payday loan companies, saying they were dangerous products classified in the same category as guns and tobacco.

At the time, LendUp criticized the ban, saying it was too broad and would negatively affect them.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/28/lendup-fine-google-payday-loan-deceptive-practices

In When Nobody Was Watching, the World Cup winner paints a portrait of a player who has given perhaps too much in the pursuit of success

When the US womens soccer team rose to fame in the late 1990s, they projected an image that was a well-polished composite of fun, friendship and teamwork in the pursuit of excellence.

Two new memoirs, Carli Lloyds When Nobody Was Watching and Abby Wambachs Forward, shatter that perception. But they do so in a way that should open a more realistic discussion on what we expect from athletes, especially but not limited to female athletes, and what they should expect from themselves.

Four years ago, Hope Solos Solo: A Memoir of Hope swung the first sledgehammer at the teams image, which had been built up through years of seeing Mia Hamm deflect praise upon her team-mates and plenty of commercials portraying the team as a fun-loving bunch of young women with ponytails and cute nicknames.

Any drama had been hidden behind the omerta of the locker room. New York Times writer Jer Longman summed it up in his chronicle of the 1999 Womens World Cup, The Girls of Summer: No team is without its internal tensions, and the American women had distinct groupings of age and alma mater, but private cliques never became public nuisances.

By 2007, the nuisances were public. Before a World Cup semi-final against Brazil, coach Greg Ryan abruptly benched Solo in favor of Briana Scurry, the accomplished but rusty back-up goalkeeper. The reasoning was murky Ryans public line at the time was about goalkeeping styles, but he later said Solo had broken several team rules off the field. After Brazil won 4-0, Solo walked over to an interviewer in the mixed zone, over the objections of US Soccer PR staff, and ripped the decision to bench her. Since then, one sentence has lived in womens soccer infamy: Theres no doubt in my mind I wouldve made those saves.

Thats unlikely Brazil were simply a class above the USA at the time. But new coach Pia Sundhage worked a miracle to get the team on the same page to win the 2008 Olympics. The wounds were closed, until Solo re-opened them with her memoir after the 2012 Olympics.

Now, coincidentally timed just after Solos termination from the national team, Lloyd has revisited the controversy. Solo has long credited Lloyd as her most steadfast supporter through the years, and in Lloyds book, she strongly defends her friend.

In mens sports, people criticize coaches and managers all the time, call out team-mates too, and its not that huge of a deal, Lloyd writes. Often the guy speaking out is even lauded for having the courage to tell the truth.

Men who lose their livelihoods or at least spend a few days enduring a public slaughter on social media or talk radio after being labeled a problem may beg to differ. In retrospect, Solos career is similar to that of Barry Bonds, Stephon Marbury or any other controversial male athlete their disagreements were tolerated when they were stars, but they were easily jettisoned when the team no longer depended on them.

But thats hardly the only complaint in Lloyds scorching book. In her eyes, the US Soccer marketing department never did enough to promote her. The national team feels as if its a girls club, and no, new members are not exactly welcome. After players convince then-coach April Heinrichs to cancel a fitness session, she gripes: The players get their way. People have told me the inmates run the asylum on the womens national team. Here is the first example of it Ive encountered.

She caps the complaints with a shocking accusation in the wake of Sundhages departure in 2012: A so-called leadership group of players had a conference call and began to quietly push Sunil [Gulati, US Soccers president] to get rid of Pia.

Lloyd says she doesnt want drama, unlike many of her team-mates. Unfortunately, in a dozen years on the US womens national team, Ive been around enough drama queens to fill a royal palace, she writes.

Yet drama is the bulk of this book. And its actually much of her career. Prodded by trainer James Galanis, she always has a chip on her shoulder, and she readily admits she plays better with an underdog mentality. She always has to have someone to prove wrong, whether its a media critic, an opposing coach (based on whispers of disrespect), or any random person who doubted her.

And shes wildly inconsistent about those who criticize her. Some merely fuel her anger. But her relationship with Galanis starts when he gives a harsh assessment, saying she has world-class talent but neither the fitness nor the mentality to live up to it, and she appreciates the honesty. She is grateful to former youth national coach Chris Petrucelli for giving her a similar assessment in cutting her from the team. Shes pleased when current US coach Jill Ellis shows her stats proving she had been giving away possession far too easily something Lloyds critics had noted for years.

She recounts a conversation with Abby Wambach, who warns that the team sees her setting herself apart from team-mates, sitting in a corner and texting, not talking with others. She concludes that Wambach is only saying these things to ingratiate herself to veteran players who dont like Lloyd. But when Galanis tells her roughly the same thing, citing the togetherness factor of a team sport, Galanis is brilliant in her eyes.

(Curiously, while Lloyd mentions many of her club teams over the years, she does not mention the 2011 WPS season in which she played for the Atlanta Beat under head coach Galanis. That year, the team won one of its 18 league games.)

Yet for all the head-scratching moments and petty accusations (the topper: in 2007, when she was nowhere near the player she is today, she gripes that a team-mate isnt passing to her, and it clearly must be for political reasons), Lloyds book has some value. Its not as directly inspirational as Wambachs book, in which the prolific goal-scorer recounts her battles with addiction with remarkable self-awareness. But Lloyd undoubtedly works hard. A familiar pattern sets in she suffers a setback, then goes home to do such intense training with Galanis that the national teams fitness coach worries she is overtaxing her body. She comes back fitter, coaches praise her, and shes back where she wants to be.

And along with Wambachs book, When Nobody Was Watching provides a harrowing account of athletes sacrifices. Lloyds single-mindedness has undoubtedly put her in a different plane to most people. Recently, she refused to take postgame media questions until a reporter deemed to be asking tough questions was dismissed. She and Galanis are constantly searching for enemies to motivate her, leaving her in a state of perpetual conflict. Worst of all, shes tells us how she is estranged from much of her family over disagreements on how to handle her soccer career.

And yet despite her flaws, by the end of When Nobody Was Watching, the reader is rooting for Lloyd. Not necessarily to add more accolades to a distinguished career, but to salvage what she sacrificed of her life. We root for her to have a happy marriage her boyfriends charming proposal is one of the few moments of levity in the book.

And we root for her to leave behind the world of paranoia and perfectionism in which she has lived for more than 10 years, and we hope that future athletes wont give so much of themselves in pursuit of glory.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/sep/27/carli-lloyd-memoir-us-women-soccer

Washington (CNN)Heath insurance is one of the many issues Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has made issue of in his campaign. CNN’s Reality Check Team spent the night putting those statements and assertions to the test.

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/25/politics/donald-trump-health-care-insurance-fact-check/index.html