Our founder’s newsletter, the Consumer Finance Breakdown, has a new post. It’s a follow-on to his previous post on this new phenomena of budgeting apps offering cash advances.

The next post in the TikTok saga, TikTok Ads for Payday Loans: Part 2, explores a peculiar example of a budgeting app like the ones from Part 1. The “typical” apps use repayment history as the primary determining factor for credit limit increases for their cash advances. This new app, however, replaces repayment history with sharing your data to the app. The owners of this app have figured out a clever way to monetize user data, but are they passing on that revenue to users in a fair way?

Here at Installmt, our mission is to reduce Americans’ reliance on predatory financial products like payday loans by helping better-regulated lenders extend credit to more borrowers. Some apps are offering new options to borrow money, but just because something has a new name doesn’t mean it’s a new thing.

You can find the full Substack at installmt.substack.com or in the footnotes of this page.