Checks and Balances: 2014 Update

This report is the fourth in a series by The Pew Charitable Trusts examining key checking account terms and conditions. In our first report, in 2011, "Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts", we studied and reported on the disclosures from the 10 largest banks in the United States by deposit volume. Our second report, in 2012, "Still Risky: An Update on the Safety and Transparency of Checking Accounts" expanded the research and examined the disclosures from the 12 largest banks as well as the 12 largest credit unions. In both reports we highlighted our policy recommendations, which urge the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, to write new rules requiring financial institutions to: * Summarize key information about terms and fees in a concise, uniform format. * Provide accountholders with clear, comprehensive terms and pricing information for all available overdraft options.* Make overdraft penalty fees reasonable and proportional to the financial institution's costs in providing the overdraft loan. * Post deposits and withdrawals in a fully disclosed, objective, and neutral manner that does not maximize overdraft fees.* Prohibit pre-dispute mandatory binding arbitration clauses in checking account agreements, which prevent accountholders from accessing courts to challenge unfair and deceptive practices or other legal violations.This study and our 2013 report, "Checks and Balances: Measuring Checking Accounts' Safety and Transparency", rate the 50 largest banks based on how well their disclosure, overdraft, and dispute resolution practices meet these policy recommendations

Checks and Balances: Measuring Checking Accounts' Safety and Transparency

Consumers need safe and transparent checking accounts. "Access to mainstream financial services at an insured institution," notes the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., "provides consumers with a safe place to save, conduct basic financial transactions, build a credit history and access credit on favorable terms, and achieve financial security."Previous research from The Pew Charitable Trusts' financial security portfolio also shows that having a checking account allows consumers to better weather economic storms. In addition, these accounts offer consumers the opportunity to enter the financial mainstream by providing access to a savings account and the potential to apply for and manage more sophisticated products such as credit to purchase a car or home.This report reviews the checking accounts offered by 36 of the nation's 50 largest banks according to their practices in three areas: disclosures, overdrafts, and dispute resolution. The study builds on two previous Pew reports. "Hidden Risks: The Case for Safe and Transparent Checking Accounts," released in April 2011, analyzed more than 250 distinct checking accounts offered by the retail subsidiaries of the 10 largest bank holding companies."Still Risky: An Update on the Safety and Transparency of Checking Accounts," released in May 2012, expanded the research of the April 2011 report to include the 12 largest banks and 12 largest credit unions as determined by domestic deposit volume.This study examines and analyzes the data differently from the first two reports. First, Pew collected the checking account disclosures of the most basic account offered by 36 of the 50 largest U.S. banks based on deposit volume as reported by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. These 36 banks comprise almost 56 percent of domestic deposit volume. Account data from the other 14 banks in the top 50 could not be collected because the information was not available online or by mail. For this report, Pew defined bank "best" and "good" checking account practices based on its previous research in the areas of disclosures, overdraft, and dispute resolution policies and practices

A Multi-task Learning Approach for Improving Product Title Compression with User Search Log Data

It is a challenging and practical research problem to obtain effective compression of lengthy product titles for E-commerce. This is particularly important as more and more users browse mobile E-commerce apps and more merchants make the original product titles redundant and lengthy for Search Engine Optimization. Traditional text summarization approaches often require a large amount of preprocessing costs and do not capture the important issue of conversion rate in E-commerce. This paper proposes a novel multi-task learning approach for improving product title compression with user search log data. In particular, a pointer network-based sequence-to-sequence approach is utilized for title compression with an attentive mechanism as an extractive method and an attentive encoder-decoder approach is utilized for generating user search queries. The encoding parameters (i.e., semantic embedding of original titles) are shared among the two tasks and the attention distributions are jointly optimized. An extensive set of experiments with both human annotated data and online deployment demonstrate the advantage of the proposed research for both compression qualities and online business values.Comment: 8 Pages, accepted at AAAI 201

Off-line vs. On-line Evaluation of Recommender Systems in Small E-commerce

In this paper, we present our work towards comparing on-line and off-line evaluation metrics in the context of small e-commerce recommender systems. Recommending on small e-commerce enterprises is rather challenging due to the lower volume of interactions and low user loyalty, rarely extending beyond a single session. On the other hand, we usually have to deal with lower volumes of objects, which are easier to discover by users through various browsing/searching GUIs. The main goal of this paper is to determine applicability of off-line evaluation metrics in learning true usability of recommender systems (evaluated on-line in A/B testing). In total 800 variants of recommending algorithms were evaluated off-line w.r.t. 18 metrics covering rating-based, ranking-based, novelty and diversity evaluation. The off-line results were afterwards compared with on-line evaluation of 12 selected recommender variants and based on the results, we tried to learn and utilize an off-line to on-line results prediction model. Off-line results shown a great variance in performance w.r.t. different metrics with the Pareto front covering 68\% of the approaches. Furthermore, we observed that on-line results are considerably affected by the novelty of users. On-line metrics correlates positively with ranking-based metrics (AUC, MRR, nDCG) for novice users, while too high values of diversity and novelty had a negative impact on the on-line results for them. For users with more visited items, however, the diversity became more important, while ranking-based metrics relevance gradually decrease.Comment: Submitted to ACM Hypertext 2020 Conferenc

Media Distribution in the Printing Industry: A Study of the Movement of Printed Materials and Electronic Files

Change, according to Phillip Ruggles (2005), can be advantageous to one\u27s business. It can sometimes be exciting and economically rewarding. At other times, change can be challenging and risky, bringing about chaos and disruption. The printing industry is undergoing both structural and cyclical change. Meeting the challenge to remain competitive in today\u27s printing industry relies heavily on providing value for customers. Thus, print service providers are offering a variety of value added services in an effort to meet customer demands and to remain competitive. One such additional service is distribution (both physical and electronic), which includes shipping/delivery, mailing, warehousing, and inventory management. As print technology advances, the offering of distribution services by print providers is becoming a trend in the industry. The objectives of this research were to understand distribution and distribution workflows, to understand the utilization of electronic distribution of files and the distribute-then-print model, and to understand how printers are incorporating e-commerce as a tool to distribute print. This thesis research also looked at the challenges, issues, and future trends anticipated by print service providers for their distribution operations. To achieve these objectives, selective answers from the 2005 Printing Industry Center (PIC) research on Media Distribution (Cummings & LeMaire) and another research on the Utilization ofE-commerce (Cummings & LeMaire) were used to support vi this thesis. Additionally, in-depth interviews were conducted with six print service providers to further understand distribution operations within the printing industry. The research results revealed key findings in the areas of physical distribution, distribution workflows, electronic distribution, e-commerce, and distribution challenges and trends. Questions addressing physical distribution and workflows yielded the following results: the definition of distribution from all the responses can be summarized as the movement of printed and finished materials from the printing plant to an internal storage location, to a distribution center, to the customer (the print buyer), or to the enduser. Various processes were described by research participants to represent their distribution operations. Figures 12 and 13 are representations of the two main workflows: a simple workflow for small companies, and a more complex workflow for larger companies. Electronic distribution findings showed that this model has not had a great impact upon the participants\u27 distribution procedures or their businesses in general. Only four (25%) of the companies interviewed have used this distribution model. Additionally, questions addressing e-commerce utilization showed that participants\u27 definition of ecommerce can be summarized as a system that allows customers to perform transactions over the Internet. Participants all agreed that e-commerce is a value-added service that benefits everybody. It was also apparent that most printers are not utilizing the full capabilities of e-commerce systems. Research participants discussed various challenges faced while offering distribution services. Among those challenges are storage and warehousing, customer information flow, fuel surcharges, postage increases, and trucking. Participants also vn anticipate the following trends relating to their distribution operations: advancement in technology, improved customer relations, and electronic flow of communication. This thesis research is valuable and contributes ample literature on the topic of distribution in the printing industry. As no research is exhaustive, opportunities remain for further research projects within various aspects of this study