Written by Brent Adams, Senior Vice President of Policy & Advocacy at Woodstock Institute. Letter to the editor originally published in the Chicago Tribune on March 23, 2026.
Regarding the op-ed “The high cost of workplace payday loan apps in Illinois” (March 13): Having worked in the consumer financial protection space for nearly 20 years, I’ve seen many consumers preyed upon by predatory lenders. There was a woman who lived in her car, fearing that an auto title lender would take it. There’s a woman on Social Security who took out several pawn loans at 240% APR and had to extend them 20 times, paying $2,500 interest on the $2,050 she borrowed. Reading Christopher Greenwood’s piece against this backdrop, the details don’t add up. Literally.
Earned wage access (EWA) providers charge no interest, mandatory fees or late fees. The only charges are a fee if you want the funds expedited and deposited into your account immediately, and some companies collect “tips” — voluntary payments like any other type of tip. In my experience, if you don’t pay the expedite fee, you still get the funds within 24 hours. Most, if not all, EWA providers have a free option, meaning you can get a cash advance for free. No payday lender ever made the payment of fees and interest optional.
Of course, overreliance on EWA can upset your finances — just as any financial service product. Unlike a typical loan, however, if you stop paying an EWA provider, the only consequence is you cannot use that service again until you pay it back. Thus, EWA itself cannot force a person into eviction. EWA is used to address a cash shortfall caused by something else.
This month, one of my dogs is having a lump removed, which will cost about $1,100. I’m using EWA to pay for part of it, which gets automatically repaid on my next payday. Every other method of addressing my shortfall, other than asking my friends for help, is more expensive than EWA. My main credit card, for example, has an APR of 28.99%, and cash advances on credit cards often carry an additional fee.
While EWA is better than other financial products, the Woodstock Institute supports legal guardrails to prevent situations such as the one Greenwood describes. Preventing “stacking,” for example — when you use multiple EWA providers at a time — is a reasonable limit that might have prevented her situation, but calling EWA a payday loan is not the answer.
